# We measured our own AI citation share for 90 days. Here is what moved it.

> Most "AI visibility" claims are never audited. So we ran the same measurement on the sites we own — in public, with the numbers disclosed. One went from cited in 0% of AI answers to 13.1%.

Published 2026-09-19 · InfoRelay GEO Lab · Field report

Nearly every "AI visibility" vendor shows a case study with a number going up and no way to check it. We wanted the opposite: a measurement we run on our own sites, publish in full, and let anyone reproduce with the same prompts.

## What we measured, exactly

The metric is **Share of Citation (SoC)**: across a fixed set of buyer-intent questions in a category, the percentage of AI answers that name a given domain as a source. We ran it across four engines — ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Perplexity, and Gemini — on 180+ prompts per category, and re-ran the identical prompt set on a schedule.

**Disclosure up front:** the sites below are our own properties. The point of dogfooding is that the numbers are ours to publish in full. The method is disclosed and reproducible with the same prompt set.

## The headline: 0% to 13.1%

Our clearest result is **TaxStand**, a DIY Texas property-tax tool. At the first baseline it was cited in **0%** of AI answers about protesting property taxes — dead last among twelve tracked brands. Ninety days later it sat at **13.1%** Share of Citation: second in its category, having passed a firm in business since the 1970s.

Category Share of Citation (4 engines, 180+ prompts, Sept 2026):

- Ownwell — 18.0%
- **TaxStand — 13.1%**
- O'Connor & Assoc. — 12.6%
- Texas Tax Protest — 6.6%
- Gill, Denson & Co. — 2.2%

It's not the only one. The tool that runs these audits holds the top Share of Citation in its own category, ahead of larger names. The rest of the portfolio spans the honest range: some sites still sit near **0%** against category leaders above 20%. That's the real starting point for most sites, and why measuring first matters.

## The four levers that actually moved the number

1. **We measured before touching anything.** A baseline of the exact buyer questions and who the engines cite today turns "improve our AI presence" into a specific list of gaps against named competitors.
2. **We made the site legible to machines — and verified it.** Crawlability, clean headings, real structured data, answer-style content. The unglamorous unlock was verifying indexation, not just submitting URLs: ~61% of sitemap URLs confirmed indexed by Google. Pages not in the index can't be retrieved, and can't be cited.
3. **We earned citations with disclosed, useful answers.** Direct, honest answers to the questions engines were actually asking, on the sources they pull from — no overlays, no fake reviews, no spun filler. (Mechanics: https://inforelay.ai/lab/how-ai-decides-what-to-cite/)
4. **We re-measured in the open.** The same prompt set, re-run on a schedule, so a real climb is distinguishable from noise.

## What didn't move it

- **Publishing more, faster** — volume added weak candidates, not citations.
- **Schema in isolation** — it helped parse already-good pages; on thin pages it changed nothing.
- **Chasing an engine we weren't in** — when a site was invisible everywhere, the fix was retrieval and corroboration, which lifted all four engines at once.

## The instrument

Every number here comes from CitedAudit (https://citedaudit.ai/), the same tool we point at client sites: multi-engine probing, Share of Citation, competitor benchmarking, and verified indexation. Full self-updating results: https://citedaudit.ai/proof.html. The TaxStand case study: https://citedaudit.ai/case-study/taxstand/. Measure your own site free: https://citedaudit.ai/check/.

Your AI citation share is a number you can measure this week, and the first honest reading is almost always lower than you'd like. That's fine — it's the same place TaxStand started.

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Source: https://inforelay.ai/lab/we-measured-our-own-ai-citations/
Index: https://inforelay.ai/llms.txt