For observability, monitoring, API & dev-infrastructure SaaS

Get your developer tool recommended when engineers ask AI

I'm Logan — I run Clear Cited myself, and developer tools are exactly who I built the measurement for.

When a platform engineer asks ChatGPT "best observability tool for Kubernetes" or Perplexity "Datadog alternatives," does your product show up? Clear Cited measures it across every engine and gets you into the answer.

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Why Clear Cited

The five levers behind share of model

We get you recommended across the 5 AI engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Grok — plus Google's AI surfaces (AI Overviews & AI Mode), measured separately — and here is the honest system beneath it: what you are actually paying for, and the real limit on each.

Every engine and surface your buyers actually use

the AI engines your buyers use, plus Google's AI surfaces and Bing's Copilot answers — each measured separately, never summed into one score

The roster is five AI engines plus two answer surfaces — AI Overviews and Microsoft Copilot — reported separately and never summed into an engine count. The five engines are measured today. Both surfaces are positioned, not measured: an engine is one foundation-model family we query directly, a surface is a product that renders an answer, and a surface never becomes an engine by being added up. Outside the labelled separate-surface panel we name the Google surface plainly as AI Overviews, because naming it beside the engines would read as an engine claim.

A method you can reproduce

pre-registered prompt sets with published hashes, run counts and a confidence interval on every figure, and null results published on the same terms as positive ones - as standing practice, not a one-off study

Confidence intervals are reported honestly wide and named per product: presence uses a Wilson interval in both products; share-of-model uses a percentile bootstrap in the paid audit and a Wilson interval in the public Index, whose pooled denominator is clustered - so those Index intervals are narrower than a cluster-corrected estimate would give, and we say so. We never narrow a CI to look more certain than the data is.

All four tiers AI cites from

we work all four tiers AI cites from — not just the fraction of your presence you directly own

This is SCOPE — the tiers we work, not an outcome we promise. The per-tier percentages are illustrative (Yext-sourced) and the earned tier (news & forums) is best-effort, never guaranteed.

Almost none of your time

your time required is almost none — sign-off graduates to become yours by default once we've earned a track record, with continued sampling

A human approves every client deliverable until a clean track record is earned; graduation is opt-in, default-off, and reversible — client-facing and published content never reaches unattended auto (AI speed, human-approved).

A system that compounds

the system learns which of your pages get cited and compounds that signal every cycle

Honest-empty until measured — attribution shows the real citations a piece earns, with the engine, prompt and date, only once they are actually earned; no projected compounding curve.

The system compounds — see how it learns which of your pages get cited → · the four tiers of citations we work →

Why developer tools win or lose in AI search first

Developers are the heaviest AI-search users of any buyer group. They ask Claude, ChatGPT, and Perplexity for tool recommendations before they touch a vendor website — so the AI's shortlist is your shortlist.

That makes AI visibility higher-stakes for developer tools than almost any category — and it's why we niched here. Technical buyers also reward exactly what we do: transparent, reproducible, data-backed measurement instead of marketing fluff. See why AI search matters for the evidence, or take the business case to your team.

The buyer questions we measure for your category

We build your "money prompt" set from how engineers actually ask. Examples by sub-category:

Observability & monitoring

"Best observability platform for microservices," "Datadog alternatives," "cheapest APM for a small team," "open-source monitoring vs SaaS." See the observability AEO playbook →

API & dev infrastructure

"Best API gateway for startups," "Kong alternatives," "managed Postgres for serverless," "fastest CI/CD for a monorepo." See the API & dev-infra AEO playbook →

CI/CD platforms

"Best CI/CD for a Series A startup," "GitHub Actions alternatives," "GitLab CI vs Jenkins," "CI/CD for Kubernetes / GitOps." See the CI/CD AEO playbook →

Incident management

"Best on-call / incident management tool," "PagerDuty alternatives," "Opsgenie vs incident.io," "cheapest incident management for a small team." See the incident-management AEO playbook →

Databases

"Best database for a SaaS," "Postgres vs MongoDB," "serverless / managed database," "cheapest database for high traffic." See the databases AEO playbook →

Feature flag platforms

"Best feature flag platform," "LaunchDarkly alternatives," "open-source feature flags," "flags with built-in experimentation." See the feature-flags AEO playbook →

Vector databases

"Best vector database for RAG," "Pinecone alternatives," "Qdrant vs Milvus," "self-hosted vector search." See the vector-DB AEO playbook →

Security & data tooling

"Best secrets manager for cloud-native teams," "SAST tools with low false positives," "Snowflake vs alternatives for a Series A." See the security & data-tooling page →

Claude matters here — most "AEO agencies" ignore it

Claude is disproportionately used by developers and technical teams, yet most providers only track ChatGPT and Google. We measure ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and Grok — because each one recommends a different set of tools, and your buyers use all of them.

What you get

Your share of model

How often each engine recommends you vs. named competitors (e.g., Datadog, Grafana, New Relic), with confidence intervals.

The gap map

The exact prompts where competitors win and you're invisible — and the third-party sources (Reddit, G2, comparison pages) the AI pulled from.

A prioritized fix list

Technical (schema, AI-bot access), entity (how AI identifies your product), and off-page (where to earn citations) — sequenced by impact.

Ongoing monitoring

Roughly 40–60% of AI-cited sources change month over month (Profound). We track weekly and keep you in the answer as the engines change.

See where your tool stands across the AI engines — free.

Get your free teardown Free tools & AEO checklist See the best AEO tools

What's included

The outcome is share of model. Here's the engine beneath it.

AI-answer optimization

The wedge — we get you named and cited in AI answers

Our wedge
Share-of-model measurement 5 engines (ChatGPT · Perplexity · Gemini · Claude · Grok) Answer-first content & schema Engine-by-engine fixes Monthly re-measurement

SEO foundation

The ground AEO stands on

Included

Technical SEO SERP / keyword Backlinks & domain authority Core Web Vitals Internal linking Schema / structured data

Done-for-you content

We write & publish — not just brief

Published across 30+ channels — your accounts, tuned per platform

LinkedIn X Reddit YouTube Dev.to Hashnode +9 more

On your domain

Answer-first articles Comparison & benchmark pages Video + VideoObject schema

Off-site authority

Listing & review sites the models cite

Curated entity work — Boost 30+ · Growth 60+ · Authority 100+

G2 Capterra Crunchbase Product Hunt + dozens more

Digital PR — earned coverage (best-effort)

Expert commentary Reporter-query responses Data-led story pitches
AI-speed, you-approved — every asset is researched and drafted fast, and you review and approve it before it publishes.

Most AEO optimizes only the slice of citations you own. Here's the whole map — all four tiers AI cites from, and how much of it we actually work.

Clear Cited works all four tiers

Coverage 100% · Control ~86% · Influence ~94% · Earned (best-effort)

Most AEO optimizes the ~44% you own. Clear Cited works all four tiers.

Control ~86% · influence ~94% · the last ~6% earned — worked, not guaranteed.

Source: Yext (6.8M citations), 2025-10 — a third-party citation-tier mix, not measured by our AI Visibility Index (which tracks share-of-model); illustrative of the tier split until we publish our own measured citation-source mix

Coverage is the scope of what we work — never a control or ranking guarantee. · See the full Citation Control Map →

The transparency wedge

A method you can reproduce

pre-registered prompt sets with published hashes, run counts and a confidence interval on every figure, and null results published on the same terms as positive ones - as standing practice, not a one-off study

at least 10 runs per engine (12 by default), spent adaptively — more on high-variance engines, fewer on stable ones, never below a 5-run floor Every presence figure carries a Wilson 95% confidence interval. Share of model carries a percentile bootstrap 95% confidence interval in the paid audit, and a Wilson 95% confidence interval in the public AI Visibility Index — the method matched to the metric and named per product, both computed from the actual runs.

Confidence intervals are reported honestly wide and named per product: presence uses a Wilson interval in both products; share-of-model uses a percentile bootstrap in the paid audit and a Wilson interval in the public Index, whose pooled denominator is clustered - so those Index intervals are narrower than a cluster-corrected estimate would give, and we say so. We never narrow a CI to look more certain than the data is.

We publish our run counts, our uncertainty and our pre-registered prompt sets. Across the 8 providers we checked on 2026-08-02: run counts 4 of 8 verified; 4 not verified; uncertainty on published figures 2 of 8 verified; 6 not verified; the prompt set published with the results 0 of 8 verified; 8 not verified. The full comparison, with each vendor’s own wording →

That is the wedge: a number you can re-run and get back. See the full method →

Hold us to it, and hold the others to it too — the 12 questions to ask anyone selling AI visibility, each one answered here with a link.