AI answers name a few businesses and cite a few pages. The Ranking Factory asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Grok and DeepSeek the questions your buyers ask, records who they name and which pages they cite, and reads Google’s AI Overviews as a separate surface. Where you are missing, it writes the evidence the question needs — only from your own pages, videos and statements — publishes it on your own site first, and asks again.
Generative Engine Optimization for agencies, consultants and in-house teams. Every number on this site and in the product comes with its sample size and its date, and nothing promises a citation: a measurement, the work, and the proof.
14-day free trial on Growth, then $129 a month. Cancel anytime; a lapsed account goes read-only, never deleted.
Measured on ourselves
These come from the same agent read tools a customer’s AI can use on their account. Two caveats travel with them: our own account is the least representative one on the platform — new capabilities are switched on for it first — and every figure says what it was counted over, with the sample beside every rate. A ledger total is a total; a “200 most recent” is one page of it. Nothing here is a projection.
32% → 84%
of Gemini’s live-search answers cited therankingfactory.com — 6 of 19 on 15 August 2026, 16 of 19 on 24 August 2026, nine days apart on the same model and the same prompt set. In the same 24 August run OpenAI’s live search cited us in 64% of answers (16 of 25) and Perplexity in 40% (10 of 25). Some prompts carry our name, and the run says which.
Source: Agent tool get_visibility_summary, runs of 15 and 24 Aug 2026
2,815
items in this account’s published-evidence ledger — Google Docs, Sheets, decks, videos and pages on our own sites — 734 of them (26%) for therankingfactory.com. Ledger totals, not a page of them.
Source: Agent tool get_published_evidence, ledger counts, 20 Sep 2026
599
citations of our own pages by the AI engines, for our nine topics across our last 12 visibility runs (11 Aug – 15 Sep 2026) — read alongside the 265 sites the engines draw on for those topics, which is the map the product gives you for yours.
Source: Agent tool list_cited_sources, 12 runs, 20 Sep 2026
6 AI crawlers
— GPTBot, ClaudeBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Bingbot and Googlebot — have been recorded fetching pages on our own site in our Cloudflare zone log. A fetch is the step before a citation, and the one most sites never get to see.
Source: Published-evidence ledger, newest 200 items for therankingfactory.com; crawler hits exist only for hosts with a connected Cloudflare zone
5 videos
from our own YouTube channel have been cited by Google’s AI Overview since 23 August 2026 — the first of our published items that surface picked up.
Source: Published-evidence ledger, newest 200 items for therankingfactory.com, 20 Sep 2026
100%
of Gemini’s live-search answers cited affiliatetrafficfactory.com on 17 September 2026 (9 of 9) — another site of ours, under three months old. Perplexity went from citing it in 10% of answers to 40% between 31 August and 17 September (1 of 10 → 4 of 10). Ten prompts a run; some carry the site’s name, and the run says which.
Source: Agent tool get_visibility_summary, project affiliatetrafficfactory.com, runs of 31 Aug – 17 Sep 2026
How a citation is counted, and what it does not claim: /help/how-we-count-a-citation. The measurement method in full: /how-we-measure.
In plain terms: people used to scan a list of links. Now they read one answer. Here is what that means.
The old way
Get a page into the list of ten blue links, and hope people click yours. Still necessary — the fundamentals have not changed — but no longer the whole job.
What changed
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews name and cite a few businesses in a single answer. The engines that search the web as they answer read pages published this week; the ones that answer from training cannot, and nothing you publish moves them.
The new way
Know what the engines say when asked, have the evidence they look for published where they read, and be able to prove which of it they fetched and cited. That is what The Ranking Factory does.
Most tools tell you what is wrong. This one measures honestly, does the work, and shows you the receipts.
Six steps, one loop that keeps running for you.
We crawl your site and propose what you do — the kind of business, the places you serve, your topics — each proposal naming the page it was found on. You correct it. The first measurement runs after that, so the baseline is yours, not our guess.
3 of 6 engines per run, your choice, are asked the questions your buyers ask, on your keys. Named, cited and recommended are counted separately, each with its 95% range and sample size; live search and trained recall are kept apart. Google’s AI Overviews are read weekly as their own surface.
Topics where the engines name competitors and not you, evidence the question needs that nothing of yours provides, and every site the answers cited instead — labelled by kind, with links to the exact pages.
Two or three of your own AI providers decide what kind of page the question needs and what it must contain. The writer is handed that contract, your own pages and videos on the subject, and what the strongest outside sources actually say. Invented figures are cut.
Your own site first — WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Ghost or any webhook, signed and idempotent — with Google Docs, Sheets, Slides and Blogger as supporting signals, a video on your channel, and announcements on LinkedIn or Business Profile only if you opt in. New pages carry provenance, and are announced through IndexNow once your site serves its own key file.
Later runs ask the same questions again and record who cited what. Your Cloudflare zone says which crawlers fetched which page. When a published page drifts from how you describe your product, Re-align rewrites it and waits for your approval; when a late part arrives, the page is updated in place.
Four of the screens you will use most, captured from a live account. Where a picture is not yet in place you will see a marked box naming the screen — we would rather show a gap than a mock-up.
Enforced in code and covered by tests, not stated as policy. These are the lines that make the numbers worth reading.
Agent access
The account answers an AI agent directly over MCP — read and write. Mint a scoped key in Settings and point Claude Code, Claude Desktop, the Claude API or your own tooling at it, or have Claude connect by signing in instead — OAuth with PKCE, no token to copy. Either way you choose at consent whether it reads every project or one; a connection given one project is matched to it exactly and reads nothing else.
Two things travel with every answer on purpose: the sample size beside every rate, so an agent quoting “45% cited” has to quote what it was measured over; and which project the answer covers, because an account-wide total is not a per-client number. No agent can publish, approve or change anything through it unless you tick “Let it make changes” when you make the key or the connection — off by default, audited, and capped at 30 writes an hour once it is on. Both ways in are on every plan, Starter included, and in the trial.
Eleven read tools, four scopes granted separately
Ask for a project that does not exist and you get an error naming the ones that do — never a silent empty list.
One project per client domain, each with its own measurements, publishing destination, topic list and “needs you” list. Several branches or divisions go in together and each can become its own campaign. White-label reports and client-ready activity reports from Agency; the weekly email leads with what was published, crawled, indexed and cited per site. Connect Claude by signing in and scope it to one client.
See agency featuresStart the 14-day Growth trial. The first thing it does is check your site, which needs nothing but a web address; the second is ask the engines about you and show you the answers with their sample sizes.