About CiteFuel
CiteFuel measures technical readiness and sampled AI-answer presence. It runs 26 published internal checks across access, optional llms.txt file hygiene, structured-data consistency, passage clarity and entity evidence, and technical foundations. The headline blends that Readiness result with completed Visibility readings and discloses skipped evidence, unavailable providers, sample size, and confidence. The score is not a Google or answer-engine ranking guarantee.
Why we built it
The GEO tool market grew up as a monitoring market. Dashboards tell you your citation share, your brand sentiment, your visibility score — and then the report sits in a tab, because translating "your internal readiness score is 34" into actual work requires knowing which evidence was measured, where robots.txt lives, and which JSON-LD fields are broken. Teams with $2,000/month enterprise GEO platforms still spend weeks on that translation.
CiteFuel therefore pairs findings with reviewable implementation artifacts: an optional llms.txt draft, a robots.txt policy suggestion, applicable JSON-LD, and suggested passage rewrites. These are starting points, not automatic fixes. A human must confirm every URL, policy choice, product claim, and visible-page representation, then verify the live result. No artifact can force indexing, ranking, recommendation, or citation.
The transparency stance
"AI score" tools have a snake-oil problem, and the antidote is publishing the methodology. Every check CiteFuel runs, every weight, scoring coverage, and every pass/partial/fail/skip rule is public at /methodology. If you think a weight is wrong, email us — disagreement makes the scoring better.
Research and publishing standards
CiteFuel publishes original research when the underlying method, date, sample, limitations, and available data can be stated plainly. Our research hub includes the June 2026 inventory of five AI-crawlability configuration signals across 10,000 popularity-ranked domains. That historical study is not a ranking experiment and does not use the current product's 26-check score.
CiteFuel is a VantaWeb company, not an independent newsroom. Our editorial policy explains authorship, human review, evidence standards, AI assistance, commercial relationships, and conflict handling. Factual concerns can be submitted through our corrections process.
Who's behind it
CiteFuel is built by Hunter Spence, a cloud infrastructure engineer (ex-Accenture infrastructure transformation) based in Florida. The audit engine, crawler fleet, and fix generators run on infrastructure he operates directly — the same discipline that keeps enterprise systems honest, applied to GEO.
The practical details
- Free tier: a measured audit with explicit coverage plus an optional llms.txt draft and one suggested passage rewrite for review.
- Commercial terms: the current eligibility conditions and remedy are governed by the refund policy; ranking, citation, and score improvement are not guaranteed.
- Crawler behavior: our bot identifies itself; an on-demand audit is capped at 20 concurrent requests overall, at most 4 concurrent requests per host, and bounded request/page budgets. In addition to the normal homepage fetch, the WAF heuristic uses seven visibility-relevant homepage user-agent probes and up to nine deep-path probes. Training/product-policy tokens are inventoried separately and do not lower Readiness solely because they are blocked. Robots rules are measured and reported; they do not currently create an automatic permanent exclusion. Current behavior and the human-reviewed crawler-request process are documented at /bot.
- Contact: support@citefuel.com — replies from a human.