RESEARCH-BACKED GENERATIVE ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Rank #1 when customers ask AI what to buy

Customers no longer browse Google. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini for recommendations. TopCited makes sure your products get recommended first.

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91.4%
Top-5 success rate
80.3%
Top-1 success rate
4 LLMs
Tested & validated
3,000
Products benchmarked
The Problem

Your products are invisible to AI

When a customer asks an LLM "recommend a good camera," the AI's answer is almost entirely determined by search engine retrieval order. Products at the bottom of retrieval have a 0% chance of being recommended.

🔍

The gatekeeper changed

ChatGPT processes 2.5 billion queries per day. Consumers are replacing "Google it" with "ask AI." If your product isn't optimized for AI search, you're losing customers every day.

📉

SEO alone isn't enough

Traditional SEO gets you into Google results. But LLMs re-rank and synthesize those results before showing them to users. Your Google ranking doesn't guarantee an AI recommendation.

🚫

No existing playbook

Keywords, backlinks, and meta tags don't influence how LLMs rank products. Until now, there was no systematic way to improve your visibility in AI-powered search.

How TopCited Works

From invisible to recommended

TopCited uses peer-reviewed optimization methods to restructure your product content so that AI systems rank it higher in their recommendations.

01

AI Visibility Audit

We query every major LLM (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity) with your target search terms and measure exactly where your products appear in AI recommendations — or if they appear at all.

02

Content Optimization

Using our research-backed CORE methodology, we optimize your product descriptions, reviews, and supporting content to align with how LLMs reason about and rank products.

03

Monitor & Adapt

LLMs update constantly. We continuously track your AI visibility across all major platforms and re-optimize when rankings change, keeping you at the top.

Proven Results

Tested across 15 categories, 3,000 products, 4 LLMs

Our CORE optimization method was rigorously evaluated in a peer-reviewed study using ProductBench, a benchmark of 15 product categories with 200 products each, tested on four major LLMs with search capabilities.

91.4%
Top-5 promotion
success rate
86.6%
Top-3 promotion
success rate
80.3%
Top-1 promotion
success rate
0%→91%
Baseline to
optimized
GPT-4o Gemini 2.5 Pro Claude 4 Grok-3
Frequently Asked Questions

What is generative engine optimization?

What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimizing your content so that AI-powered search engines — like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude — recommend your products or content first. As consumers shift from traditional search engines to asking AI directly, GEO is becoming as essential as SEO was in the Google era.

How is GEO different from SEO?

Traditional SEO optimizes for search engine crawlers using keywords, backlinks, and technical signals. GEO optimizes for how large language models synthesize, reason about, and rank information when generating recommendations. The ranking factors are fundamentally different — LLMs evaluate content coherence, comparative reasoning, and contextual relevance, not keyword density or link authority.

How does TopCited work?

TopCited uses CORE (Controlling Output Rankings in Generative Engines), a peer-reviewed optimization methodology developed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We analyze how major LLMs process your product content, then optimize descriptions using reasoning-based and review-based strategies that align with how AI systems rank products.

Does TopCited replace my current SEO strategy?

No — TopCited complements your existing SEO. Most LLMs use Google or Bing for initial retrieval before synthesizing their own rankings. You need traditional SEO to be retrieved and GEO to be ranked favorably in the AI's final recommendation. TopCited handles the GEO layer that traditional SEO tools cannot address.

Which AI platforms does TopCited optimize for?

TopCited optimizes for all major LLMs with search capabilities: ChatGPT (GPT-4o), Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Perplexity, and Grok. Our methodology is model-agnostic and has been validated across all four major platforms with consistent results.

Is this ethical? Is it manipulation?

TopCited takes a white-hat approach, analogous to legitimate SEO practices. We help businesses write clearer, more informative product content that AI systems can better understand and evaluate. We do not inject hidden prompts, adversarial text, or deceptive content. Our research is published openly and our methods produce fluent, natural language that improves the quality of product descriptions.

Who is behind TopCited?

TopCited is built on research from the DREAM Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led by Prof. Haohan Wang. The team has published extensively at top AI venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML) on trustworthy AI systems. The underlying CORE methodology is peer-reviewed and benchmarked on 3,000 real products across 15 categories.

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Find out if your products are visible to AI

We'll audit your top 10 products across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity — and show you exactly where you rank. Free, no commitment.

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