CitedLink reads your Search Console and Analytics, crawls every page that links to you, and grades each link on facts you can check: followed or nofollow, in the body or in a footer, indexable, live. Every verdict comes with its reasons.
Every link on your dashboard carries one of these, with the reasons it was graded that way.
Four words. Each one covers a set of facts the crawler found on the page, and the receipt lists them.
Every link points at one page. CitedLink watches that page in Search Console and reports the change in position and impressions against the 28 days before the link appeared.
| Source | Target | Verdict | Position change |
|---|---|---|---|
| weeklystack.email/issue/214 | /guides/csv-import | Counted | -7.2 |
| devtoolbox.page/directory/data-tools | / | Weak | -0.4 |
| roundup.buildlog.co/2026/august | /pricing | Vanity | +0.3 |
| oldstack.dev/tools | /integrations/slack | Dead | no data |
Rankings move for many reasons: a rival rewrites a page, a core update lands, you edit the page yourself. CitedLink puts the baseline next to the window after the link and labels both, so the comparison is yours to read.
Plenty of placements carry a parameter: ?ref=devtoolbox or ?via=buildlog. Analytics records it on the landing page, so the sessions behind one placement can be counted on their own.
CitedLink pulls those parameters from your GA4 property every day and groups the sessions by tag. A tag that turns up without a matching link in your list becomes a candidate link and gets crawled like the rest.
| Ref tag | Landing page | Sessions | First seen |
|---|---|---|---|
| ?ref=devtoolbox | / | 412 | Aug 4 |
| ?ref=weeklystack | /guides/csv-import | 168 | Aug 12 |
| ?via=buildlog | /pricing | 54 | Aug 19 |
| ?ref=hollis | /guides/csv-import | 21 | Aug 26 |
You write the questions a buyer would type. CitedLink asks them and records which sites the answer named, week after week.
| Prompt | ChatGPT | Perplexity | Google AI Overviews | Claude |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| best tool to diff two large CSV files | Cited | Cited | Not cited | Cited |
| how do I import a 2 GB CSV into Postgres | Not cited | Cited | Not cited | Not cited |
| CSV import with column mapping for a SaaS app | Cited | Not cited | Cited | Not cited |
| clean up messy CSV exports from a CRM | Not cited | Not cited | Not cited | Not cited |
Each engine runs once a week on 20 prompts per site, and the last four weeks sit side by side, so a mention appearing or dropping out is visible on the row. The answer text and its citations are stored with the run.
Four sources. Every screen names the one behind its numbers.
Nothing CitedLink reports is scored by a third party. A domain rating is one number another company computes from its own crawl. Every number in the product comes from your own properties or from a page CitedLink fetched, and each one names its source.
Link grading and ref links are in every plan. AI engines are switched on per site, so you pay for the ones you watch.
AI engines cost extra per site per month: ChatGPT $8, Perplexity $4, Google AI Overviews $4, Claude $10, or $19 for all four.
Connect Search Console and CitedLink grades the links you already have, then every one you earn after that.
Connect Search Console