Shoppers ask AI first.
Be the store it cites.
CiteSpot does white-hat GEO (generative engine optimization) for independent online stores: we make your store easy for ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity to find, read and cite when shoppers ask what to buy. These AIs search the web on the spot, pick a few sources and link them. We make your store one of the sources they pick.
For specific, long-tail questions, results usually show within weeks. No paid links, no fake accounts, and no ranking promises.
Qbest portable power station for van life under $500
For van life on a budget, look for at least 500 Wh and a pure sine wave inverter.1 Owners on forums prefer LiFePO4 batteries because they last more charge cycles.3 One model under $500 with 3,000-cycle LiFePO4 cells is listed with full specs on this store.2
- 1An outdoor gear review site
- 2yourstore.com · your store
- 3A van life thread on reddit.com
When AI answers a question, it searches the web right then
Nobody has to retrain a model. If your page is indexed, readable and answers the question well, it can be quoted. That is why long-tail questions can move within weeks.
It turns the question into several searches
Ask for "a power station for van life under $500" and the AI runs narrower searches such as "van life power station capacity" or "LiFePO4 cycle life". Google calls this query fan-out. OpenAI says ChatGPT rewrites a question into one or more targeted searches.
Those narrow searches are long-tail terms. Big brands rarely answer them in detail, so small stores can: one page that settles one specific question, with facts nobody else has. Not a page per phrasing, which Google calls scaled content abuse.
It opens the pages it finds and reads them
Pages it cannot read get skipped: a robots.txt rule or a CDN setting blocks the crawler, the main text only appears after JavaScript runs, or the page was never indexed.
Plenty of stores are stuck here without knowing it. It is the first thing our free check looks at.
It quotes passages that answer directly, and links them
A paragraph that gives the answer up front, with specs, prices and sourced numbers, is easy to lift. A page made of images and slogans gives the AI nothing to quote.
Every page we write follows that rule and passes a check before it goes live.
What kind of store do you run?
Each platform gets stuck in different places. See what we change and deliver for yours.
How long does it take? Three cases
It depends on where your store is stuck. This is how we describe timing, in writing and in calls.
AI crawlers can't get in or can't read the page
A wrong robots.txt rule, a CDN's AI crawler setting, or text that only loads with JavaScript. These are technical fixes and take days.
How you know: run geo-score again the day it's fixed. When each AI comes back to recrawl is up to them.
Specific questions shoppers actually ask
Questions with a use, a budget or a situation, like "a power station for van life under $500 that can run a coffee maker". Write one good page for it and it usually gets indexed and starts appearing in AI answers within weeks.
How you know: ask the same set of questions every week and log whether you are mentioned and which page is cited.
Terms like "best power station"
Big brands and established review sites have written about these for years, so the AI has plenty of sources to choose from. Competing with your own site takes months, often more than six.
What we do: we don't sell this result and don't measure ourselves on it. We win the long tail first.
We measure acceptance by the AIV score only (AI visibility score: geo-score's 0 to 100 rating on a public rubric, which you can re-run yourself). We track traffic and leads with you, but they stay out of the contract: seasons, ads and prices move them too much.
Spend one minute: can AI get into your store?
geo-score is our open-source scoring tool (MIT license). One command gives your site a 0 to 100 score: whether AI crawlers can reach it, whether they can read it, whether there is anything worth quoting, and whether the AI can tell who you are.
Anyone who runs it gets the same score. Test yourself first, and later use it to check our work.
Rather not use a terminal? Send us your store URL. A person on our team reviews it and sends you a free quick review within 48 hours: where you are stuck, what to fix first, and roughly how long it takes.
$ python3 geo_score.py www.citespot.si --brief AIV READINESS https://www.citespot.si 90 / 100 Leading Reachable 15/15 ✓✓✓ Understandable 22/22 ✓✓✓✓✓ Content Citability 31/35 ✓✓✓◐✓ Brand Credibility 3/10 ⊘⊘✗✓✗ Answer Fit 5/6 ✓⊘◐ Biggest gaps +4 Knowledge-graph entity +2 Statistics carry a source +2 Video and multimodal presence
Real output (excerpt; the gaps list keeps only the points): this website, geo-score 1.8.0, measured on launch day, October 9, 2026. Brand credibility scored 3 of 10, and we are working on it.
Four things we do, in this order
All of it happens on your own site, or under your own real identity. We don't post on other people's sites and we don't run fake accounts.
Fix access
Let AI search crawlers in, make the main text readable without JavaScript, and fill in the sitemap and structured data.
You get: a change list and geo-score before and after. Works on Shopify, WooCommerce and custom builds.
One question, one answer page
We pick questions your shoppers really ask and write one page for each, on your site. The answer comes first, specs and prices are stated, and every number has a source.
You get: the pages and a fact sheet for each one. Nothing goes live until it passes our check and you confirm the facts.
Real discussion where AI looks
AI answers lean heavily on Reddit, YouTube, review sites and directories. Your staff answer real questions there under their own names, with the company named. Any paid placement is labelled as an ad.
This is an add-on. Not every store needs it.
Measure regularly, score monthly
Ask the same set of questions on a schedule, note whether you are mentioned and which page is cited, and re-run geo-score once a month.
You get: a monthly test and report on the quarterly service, a weekly test, report and dashboard on managed. The scoring method is public, so you can re-run it any time.
We tried it on our own product first
An AI video tool we built for overseas users. From March 21 to April 17, 2026, we spent four weeks on GEO on its own site. These are its visitor numbers from January 1 to September 16.
Source: the product's own analytics (PostHog channel grouping, visitors, not sign-ups or revenue). One site, one observation, with new model launches and a promotion in the same weeks, so the effect of GEO alone can't be separated out. It shows the approach can work. It doesn't mean your store will see the same numbers.
Public prices, billed quarterly
Most companies plan budgets by quarter, so we bill by quarter. Start with a diagnosis and go further only if it's worth it.
| Service | What you get | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Quick reviewSee where you're stuck | A person reviews your store and tells you where it's stuck and what to fix first. Within 48 hours. | Free |
| DiagnosisOne-off | Full scored report, a list of shopper questions, how each AI answers them today, and a prioritized fix list. Credited toward your first quarter if you continue. | From US$1,190once |
| Quarterly serviceWhere most stores start | Fix access, a batch of answer pages each quarter, and a monthly re-test and report. | From US$2,990per quarter · US$11,690 a year |
| ManagedA team watching it for you | Everything in the quarterly service, plus weekly testing with a dashboard, Search Console follow-up, more pages and weekly reports. | From US$7,790per quarter · US$30,590 a year |
| MonitoringNumbers only | We don't touch your site. Every week we ask 20 questions through four AI APIs and log whether you are mentioned. One report a month. | US$590per quarter · US$1,990 a year |
Things we won't do, at any price
Some of these work for a while. When Google or a platform catches them, your domain pays, not ours. We only do work you won't have to worry about later.
- Buying or trading linksPaying, or sending free product, for links; link swaps.
- Keyword-swapped pagesHundreds of pages per city or keyword that differ by a few words.
- Fake accounts and seeded postsAsking and answering your own questions, or spreading one claim across accounts so the AI thinks many people say it.
- Undisclosed paid contentPaid articles or paid spots on "best of" lists that aren't labelled as ads.
- Expired domains and click farmingBuying old domains for their rankings; paying people or scripts to search for you and click.
- Made-up numbers and ranking promisesNo number without a source. No "top 3 in two weeks".
Questions store owners ask
Each guide gives the answer first, then the steps, with sources at the end.
- What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?Same foundations, different output.
- How AI assistants decide which stores to mentionWhich crawlers and indexes each AI uses.
- How long until a new page shows up in Google and AI answers?Google's own wording, and our three cases.
- Can AI crawlers reach your store? How to checkrobots.txt, Cloudflare and Shopify, one by one.
- Shopify Agentic Storefronts: what store owners should checkHow product data reaches ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot.
- How to choose a GEO provider and what the contract should sayPromises to be wary of, and how to define acceptance.
Common questions
Anything else, email hello@jianruntech.com.
What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?
GEO (generative engine optimization) means making sure AI assistants can find you and choose to quote you when they answer. SEO is about ranking in the list of links on a search results page.
The foundations are the same: pages that can be crawled, understood and trusted. Google itself says that, from its side, optimizing for AI search is still SEO. The difference is the output. A search page shows ten links and lets people choose. An AI answer quotes a few sources directly. So GEO cares most about whether a passage answers the question by itself.
How long until I see results?
It depends on where you're stuck. Blocked crawlers take days to fix. A good page for a specific long-tail question usually gets indexed and starts appearing in answers within weeks. Category terms like "best power station" take months, often more than six. We don't promise rankings or give exact week counts.
Can you get me recommended by ChatGPT?
Nobody can promise that. AI answers vary, and the same question asked twice can cite different sources. What we can show you is the method, written down, and a score you can re-run yourself. The contract covers the score's baseline and improvement. Mentions and visitors go into your reports (monthly on the quarterly service, weekly on managed).
My store runs on Shopify. Does this work?
Yes, and on WooCommerce and custom builds too. On Shopify there are two paths to look after. Product cards (title, price, stock) reach ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot through Shopify's Agentic Storefronts, which is on by default for eligible stores, so complete product data matters. Answer pages reach AI through normal web crawling and indexing, which is where your blog and pages come in.
Will Google penalize AI-written content?
Google looks at whether content helps people, not whether AI wrote it. Mass-producing low-value pages to game rankings breaks its spam policies either way. We write each page for a real question, you confirm the facts, and pages are not keyword-swapped copies of each other.
Who are you?
Jianrun Tech, a small team in Shenzhen. Our founder spent eleven years at Amazon, Shopee and Coupang and wrote geo-score. See about us.
Send your store URL, get a free quick review within 48 hours
A person checks whether AI can get in, what your shoppers ask, and how each AI answers today. Then you decide whether to go further.