Richard Patey

What is Cited? Why Maciej and I started a GEO agency

By Richard Patey. Last updated 29 October 2026.

Short answer: Cited is a GEO agency I run with Maciej Marek. It gets your business named when customers ask AI. We track how you’re doing in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode, and who’s being named instead of you. We send you content to add or fix on your site, and place mentions in the sources the AI platforms actually read. Two plans, $495 or $995 a month.

Why I set it up

In September I said Redundant was over. I said files got cheap. That was the polite version.

The real version is that selling AI automation skills stopped working as a business. I spent months packaging up workers and playbooks you could upload to Claude. Then the Grok bot started just doing the work. You ask, it does it, whether you’ve uploaded a skill or not.

When the bot does the job for free, nobody pays for the instructions.

So I asked myself what I know that hasn’t gone cheap. The answer is getting businesses found.

Back in 2012 I ran an SEO agency. Those were the wild early days. Most businesses had never touched their own websites, so fixing the basics and writing pages that answered real questions got you most of the way. When a keyword got competitive, you needed other sites linking to you, and that was where the real work was.

I got my own site to PageRank 6 on the Google Toolbar back then, before Ahrefs became how everyone judged a site. That was a big deal when most small sites sat at 2 or 3. I did it by getting it linked from a huge number of European Union websites that were promoting internships as part of an EU funding programme.

It’s also how I built the content sites I sold. FunnelEngine.com ranked top for “clickfunnels.com” for a while, which is about as cheeky as SEO gets. And during the 2017 crypto boom my personal site ranked top for “how to buy altcoins” for six months.

Search hasn’t died, it’s moved

People still ask where to hire skis, which padel club is best, who to buy from. Now they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode.

And it feels a lot like 2012 again. Most businesses haven’t done anything about it yet, so in most niches some on-page fixes and new content that answers what customers actually ask will get you a long way. Once a category gets competitive, the AI names the businesses other sites talk about: articles, forum threads, directories, best-of round-ups. That’s link building again, except a mention can count even without the link.

So I’m going back to my SEO agency roots.

Testing it on my own sites first

I tested it on my own niche sites first. I got BidPadel named by Grok when people ask for a padel directory, and then offered a one-off Visibility Pack product on there as well as on my ski site Snowbistro.

Then the obvious problem showed up. AI answers change every month. Staying named is ongoing work, and nothing about it is specific to padel or skiing.

So I’m doing it properly. The new business is called Cited, and I’m running it with Maciej again, from LetterOperators fame. I used to rank top in Google for “productized services” on my personal site too, so it only seems fitting to launch another one after LetterOperators.

What Cited does

Cited gets your business named when customers ask AI. Every week we track how you’re doing in the LLMs and who’s being named instead of you. We then send you content to add or fix on your site, and place mentions in the sources the AI platforms actually read.

There are two plans, $495 or $995 a month. No setup fee, no contract, no calls, no portal. A mention only counts once it’s live. If one doesn’t land, it carries over to the next month.

Visible Shortlisted
Price $495 a month $995 a month
Month 1 1 new page, up to 5 rewrites 2 new pages, up to 10 rewrites
From month 2 3 mentions a month, at least 1 editorial 6 mentions a month, at least 2 editorial
Prompts tracked 25, on 5 AI platforms 50, on 5 AI platforms

Annual billing is 12 months for the price of 10. Plan details as listed on cited.page on 29 October 2026.

I started with ski and padel because that’s where I already have the boards and the relationships. But now with Maciej we’re taking on any online business that wants to show up when someone asks “best X in Y”.

Why we built our own tool

We’ve also built our own tool to run it, because the ones we tried weren’t good enough.

Here’s the problem with AI answers. Ask the same question twice and you get a different list. On 27 October we collected 1,780 answers from eight AI sources. Even after asking one question 30 times, a brand that showed up in half the answers still had a margin of error of 18 points either way. A single screenshot of “we’re in ChatGPT” proves almost nothing.

The best-known tool we tried asks each question once per engine and calls that a result. Ours asks the questions real buyers ask, many times and in several wordings, and counts.

It pulls answers through each engine’s official API with web search switched on, and logs every single one, so any number in your report can be traced back to the answers behind it.

It treats Google AI Mode and AI Overviews as two separate engines, because they are. Their cited sites overlapped by just 13%. The tool we tried lumps them together.

It checks every answer against a fact sheet for your business. If ChatGPT has your prices or locations wrong, we find where the wrong fact came from and get it corrected at the source.

And it proves what worked. Every change is tested against a group of questions we didn’t touch, so the report says “worked”, “no change we can detect” or “got worse”.

What we can promise

Nobody can honestly promise you number one in ChatGPT. According to SparkToro, the same brand order repeats in about 1 answer in 1,000 (Search Engine Journal’s write-up). What we can promise is numbers you can trust and work you can see.

You can grab your free audit and we’ll tell you what AI says about your business right now, and who it names instead.

Who does the work

I guess I contradicted myself when I said 2026 was my last year in business.

To be honest I missed working with Maciej, and it’s nice to have found something solid that hits both our backgrounds: me with SEO, and him with the technical ability to build our own internal app to run the customer work.

FAQ

What is Cited? A GEO agency. It gets businesses named in the answers ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini give, by fixing their own site and placing mentions where those engines read.

Who is behind Cited? Richard Patey and Maciej Marek. I run strategy and placements; Maciej runs research, writing and delivery.

How much does Cited cost? $495 or $995 a month. No setup fee, no contract, no calls, cancel any time.

Do I need to give Cited access to my website? No. Pages and fixes arrive ready to paste. We never log into your site.

Is there a free version? The audit is free: it shows what AI says about your business right now, and who it names instead.

Disclosure: I co-founded Cited with Maciej Marek.