Citations.io Launches: See How ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini Talk About Your Brand

The new SEO frontier: being cited by AI

Former agency boss Josh Tulip has launched Citations.io, an AI Search intelligence platform that shows brands how they are mentioned, ranked, recommended, and cited inside AI-generated answers — across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude.

The Newcastle upon Tyne-based SaaS company, announced October 13, tracks the commercially relevant prompts customers actually ask while researching products, services, and businesses — then analyzes the visibility signals inside the answers: brand mentions, recommendation status, answer position, competitors, citations, source URLs, and source domains.

Beyond prompt trackers

Citations.io positions itself as more than another prompt-tracking dashboard. It connects visibility observations with competitor intelligence, citation analysis, Source Influence, and prioritized recommendations.

Founder Josh Tulip, who has spent around 15 years across technical SEO, search intelligence, online reputation, and digital growth, says the question that matters most is not simply "are we appearing?" but "why is another brand appearing instead?" If an AI engine repeatedly recommends a competitor and leans on a particular set of sources, that gives marketing teams something tangible to investigate.

From dashboard to action

The platform's differentiator is its Implementation Packs — structured briefs that convert identified visibility gaps into concrete work for SEO, content, digital PR, and brand teams. Recommendations can include content to create or improve, influential third-party sources to target, internal linking, metadata, structured data, and other authority-building activity.

The pitch: marketing teams do not need another dashboard of numbers without a path to action. The value is understanding why something is happening, where the opportunity is, and what to prioritize next.

The business story

Tulip has bootstrapped Citations.io to date, funding development without external equity while building an initial customer base — and the validation is notable: around 70% of current customers are in the United States, despite the company being headquartered in Newcastle.

He is now assembling the founding leadership team and preparing for the company's first external funding round, with the explicit purpose of accelerating something already proven rather than funding an experiment. The US and EMEA are expected to drive future growth, with a stronger operational presence in New York planned for 2027 — but Tulip is clear that Newcastle remains home.

Citations.io is available internationally at citations.io.

What this means for your business

1. Your next customer discovery happens inside an AI answer. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best option in your category, what does it say — and which competitor does it recommend instead? If you do not know, you are marketing blind. This is now a measurable channel, not a mystery.

2. Find out which sources shape the answers about you. AI engines lean on specific sources when recommending brands. Identifying those sources — review sites, publications, directories — and building presence there is the new digital PR playbook.

3. Briefs beat dashboards. The Implementation Pack model is the right shape for AI-visibility work: specific content to create, specific sources to target, specific technical fixes. Whatever tool you use, demand action items, not just charts.

4. Bootstrap to proof, then raise. Tulip's path — self-fund to real customers, then raise to accelerate — is a disciplined template for B2B SaaS founders. Real demand before capital beats capital before demand.

The bottom line: AI-generated answers are a discovery layer your brand either shows up in or does not. "Are we being cited?" is now as important a marketing question as "are we ranking?" — and it is finally measurable.