# Cited.today

Aiolum story: https://aiolum.com/story/cited-today/ · added 2026-11-06 · updated 2026-11-06

**In short.** Cited.today (AI agent that finds the articles AI assistants cite instead of you and writes briefs to beat them (GEO), Portugal): Live with a paid self-serve plan, November 2026. Evidence grade E: no revenue figure was checked. Team: 1 named founder, Tom Benattar, in Lisbon; the site also speaks of "the team"; headcount not published. Launched October 2026; still running.

AI agent that finds the articles AI assistants cite instead of you and writes briefs to beat them (GEO) · Portugal · AI-native · solo founder · still running · group: SEO and AI search

- Outcome: Live with a paid self-serve plan, November 2026 (evidence grade of the headline number: E; no revenue figure)
- Launch: October 2026; months from launch to the outcome: 1
- Team: 1 named founder, Tom Benattar, in Lisbon; the site also speaks of "the team"; headcount not published
- Outside funding: No funding round found; operated by TB Labs LLC (New Mexico, USA)
- Main factor: The brief, not the score
- Meters, 1 to 4: evidence strength 1, copyable pattern 2, capital needed 1
- Tags: AI-native, Solo founder, Bootstrapped, Running, B2B, Marketing

Links:

- Visit cited.today: https://www.cited.today/
- Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/cited-today

**The product.** A web service for content teams and agencies. Each morning an agent asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Claude and Copilot about 100 buying questions of the customer's market, finds where a competitor is cited and the customer is not, takes apart the page that the engine opened before citing the competitor, and sends one brief a weekday: the article to write, its format, what it must include and the angle to beat that page. Four weeks after an article is published, it asks the questions again.

**Why it worked.** Most AI visibility tools show a share-of-answers score. The founder, who ran GEO work for B2B software companies through an agency, wrote that the content team then asks "what do we write on Monday to get cited? No tool answers that." Cited.today sells the answer to that question and keeps the score only as the check.

Evidence grades: A = disclosed by a public company, a filing or a payment processor, or verified by one; B = two or more independent reports agree, or a journalist confirmed it; C = a founder claim that no one else verified; D = reported, not verified: one founder claim or a third-party estimate with no second source; E = no revenue figure found, so the headline is a non-money fact and the other facts carry their own grades; calc = computed on this page from graded facts.

## Summary

Cited.today is a GEO tool. GEO, generative engine optimization, means work that makes a brand appear in the answers of AI assistants, as SEO does for search results. Before an assistant answers, it opens 3 to 6 web pages; the product finds the competitor page among them, lists what it has (a comparison table, verified prices, a named author, the question as a heading) and writes a content brief, a short specification of an article that a writer then writes. The privacy policy says Anthropic's Claude writes the questions and briefs and DataForSEO asks ChatGPT the questions.

Tom Benattar, based in Lisbon, built it. His about page says he earlier co-founded PixelMe and PimpMySaaS and ran MailTracker, and that all three were acquired. The first Internet Archive copy of the site is from 13 October 2026, and the Product Hunt launch was on 21 October 2026. The home page sells one self-serve plan with a 7-day trial that needs a card.

No revenue figure, customer count or payment-processor profile was found, so the evidence is grade E: a live product with published prices, about one month old. The results on the home page are for the founder's own other product, gethumaninbox.com, not for customers.

## Pricing

Cited.today prices on the home page, read 6 November 2026 (grade C)

| Plan | Per month, billed yearly (US$) | Per month, billed monthly (US$) | Limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Briefs, 1 site |  | 99 | 100 buying questions on six engines, one brief every weekday |
| Each further site |  | 25 | one domain with its subdomains |
| 5 sites |  | 199 | total; US$39.80 per site |
| 10 sites |  | 324 | total; US$32.40 per site |
| 25 sites |  | 699 | total; US$27.96 per site |

One plan, billed monthly. The home page says the plan costs US$99 a month for the first site and US$25 a month for each further site, with a table of totals: 5 sites US$199, 10 sites US$324, 25 sites US$699. Prices are in USD, VAT excluded. The first 7 days are free with a card; the home page offers a full refund after the first month. The 13 October 2026 copy showed different plans: Briefs at US$99 per site, "Briefs + drafts" at US$199 per site with "5 beta spots", and US$15 per extra client site.

## How much revenue does Cited.today make? The numbers, graded

A one-founder AI search content tool, live with published prices since October 2026; no revenue or customer figure published

| Fact | Value | Grade | Note | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | not published | C | No figure on the home page, the about page, the Product Hunt page or the terms. No TrustMRR profile was looked up, because no lead named one. | [1, 2, 3] |
| Founder | Tom Benattar, Lisbon | C | About page: "Cited.today is built by Tom Benattar". Product Hunt maker comment: "Tom here, founder of Cited.today." | [2, 3] |
| Operating company | TB Labs LLC, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA | C | Terms, effective 21 October 2026. The founder lives in Portugal; the company is registered in the USA. | [5] |
| First public copy of the site | 13 October 2026 | C | Earliest Internet Archive capture of www.cited.today. | [6] |
| Product Hunt launch | 21 October 2026; 3 points and 2 followers on 6 November 2026 | C | Product Hunt page, scheduled 21 October 2026, "Launched 16d ago", no reviews. | [3] |
| Price | US$99 a month for the first site, US$25 a month for each further site | C | Home page pricing section, read 6 November 2026. The founder's Product Hunt comment of 21 October 2026 also says "$99 per site, self-serve, 7-day free trial". | [1, 3] |
| AI models used | Anthropic Claude writes questions and briefs; DataForSEO queries ChatGPT | C | Privacy policy, section on AI engines and providers. | [4] |
| Engines checked | ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Copilot | C | Home page FAQ. The terms name four: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews. | [1, 5] |
| Answers logged by the founder | about 130,000 | C | Product Hunt maker comment: "I've logged about 130,000 answers to figure it out." | [3] |
| Test result on the founder's own product | 0 to 420 Google clicks and 0% to 12% AI visibility score | C | Home page and about page, for gethumaninbox.com, from Search Console, 11 July to 9 October 2026. This is the founder's own product, not a customer. | [1, 2] |
| Funding round | none found | C | No page read names an investor or a round for Cited.today. | [1, 2, 3] |
| Time from launch to the headline fact | 1 month | calc | Calculated: October 2026 to November 2026. | [3, 6] |

How to read this table: a grade C value is a statement on the company's own pages or the founder's own post. A "calc" value was computed on this page. No value is grade A or B, and no revenue figure exists.

## When did Cited.today launch, and how did it grow? Timeline

From the founder's manual method on his own product in July 2026 to a public launch in October 2026. Each entry carries its grade.

- **July 2026** (grade C [2]): The founder's other product, gethumaninbox.com, has no content and no traffic. He starts writing articles by hand to beat the pages the AI engines cite.
- **29 August 2026** (grade C [1]): The first of those articles go live; Search Console clicks start that day, according to the home page chart.
- **13 October 2026** (grade C [6]): First Internet Archive copy of www.cited.today: a free first article list, Briefs at US$99 per site and a "Briefs + drafts" beta, as the page then stated.
- **21 October 2026** (grade C [3, 5]): Terms take effect under TB Labs LLC, and the product launches on Product Hunt.
- **6 November 2026** (grade C [1]): One plan with a 7-day card trial, an agency price per extra site, and a live demo built on agorapulse.com.

## Why did Cited.today work?

### The brief, not the score

The home page says: "Visibility tools show you the score. Cited.today gives you the article." Each item names the question the customer loses, the competitor page the engines opened, what that page contains, and the article to write. The visibility score is kept as the check four weeks later.

### The founder's own product as the test case

The method was first run by hand on gethumaninbox.com, the founder's AI email assistant. The home page shows that site's Search Console chart, 420 clicks and 27,000 impressions from 11 July to 9 October 2026, as the proof.

### Priced for agencies

Each extra site adds a small monthly amount, so an agency can add one site per client in one account and one invoice. The founder sold GEO and Reddit work to software companies through his agency before, which is the buyer this pricing is written for.

## How it was built

These details come from the company's own pages. They are grade C.

- Anthropic's Claude writes the buying questions and the briefs from the site description, the competitors and the public pages involved, the privacy policy says.
- DataForSEO, a search-data API company, asks ChatGPT the buying questions for the service.
- Hosting is on Vercel, account email goes through Resend, and Stripe takes the card payments.
- Google Analytics and Vercel Web Analytics count visits; the Meta pixel and the Google tag measure the company's own ads.
- The app runs at app.cited.today with a public live demo; the site has a blog of comparison articles about GEO tools.

Sources: [4, 5, 1]

## Who tried this before Cited.today, and why did they fail?

Three companies in our database of failed startups sold marketing measurement or content tools that larger platforms later offered themselves. The values below are from that database and are not independently verified.

The failed startups come from our database of dead startups, retold here in our own words; Its entries are AI-assisted summaries of public sources, so they carry no evidence grade.

### Klout (2008 to 2017; funding US$40M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A score from 1 to 100 that measured how influential a person or a brand was on social networks.
- Why it died: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram built their own analytics, and a single score built on other platforms' data lost its value.
- Record: 

### SumAll (2011 to 2019; funding US$15M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: One dashboard that collected a small business's data from its social media and marketing platforms.
- Why it died: It could not set itself apart from larger analytics products and free tools, and small businesses did not see the price as worth it.
- Record: 

### Pressly (2011 to 2018; funding US$2.9M; cause: Competition)

- Promise: A platform to collect, curate and distribute content for brands.
- Why it died: Larger marketing platforms added content curation to their suites, and a single-purpose tool could not stand out.
- Record: 

## What changed

Klout and SumAll sold a number measured on platforms they did not own; when the platforms built their own analytics, the number lost its price. Cited.today makes the same bet on AI assistants it does not own, and Pressly shows that large marketing suites add single features. Cited.today answers that risk by selling the next action, the article, rather than the score.

What is new is that assistants open a few pages before answering, and those pages can be found and copied in structure. Whether teams pay for a daily brief for long is not shown by any source read.

## Can one person copy Cited.today now?

**Verdict: Yes, as one more entry in a crowded category.**

The parts are rented: a search-data API to ask the assistants, a language model to write briefs, standard hosting and payments. A solo founder can copy it. The hard part is the buyer list, and this founder came with an agency's clients and three earlier products.

1. Run the method by hand on a site you own, and publish the before-and-after data.
2. Ask the assistants a fixed set of buying questions daily and record the pages they open.
3. Turn each lost question into one brief with the structure of the winning page.
4. Price per site so that agencies can add every client.

**What is still open.** The same brief-first approach for other places where AI answers pick sources: app store listings, product feeds for shopping assistants, local business pages.

## What could go wrong for Cited.today?

- **What is not verified.** No revenue figure, no customer count and no paying-customer list was found. I looked for a payment-processor profile, a founder post with figures, a press article and a funding announcement. The product is about one month old (first archive copy 13 October 2026, Product Hunt launch 21 October 2026 with 3 points). The results shown on the home page are for gethumaninbox.com, the founder's own product, not a customer. A reader could look for a verified revenue profile or customer case studies later.
- **The owner's other products.** The about page names the founder as co-founder and CEO of Podawaa, which it calls "the LinkedIn engagement tool", and says his agency PimpMySaaS was "the Reddit and GEO agency" for 50+ software companies before its sale to Getfluence. Cited.today's pages name these but do not sell or link to them; this page judges Cited.today only. Its own terms say the agent queries the AI engines "the way a user would".
- **Logos without sources.** The home page says "The team has shipped content for" and shows logos of Deel, Flodesk, Gong, lemlist, Vercel, Webflow, Weglot and MailTracker, with no case study for any of them. The founder's Product Hunt comment says his agency did GEO work for Lemlist, Crisp and Agorapulse. The live demo on agorapulse.com carries the line "Cited.today is not affiliated with Agorapulse."
- **Competition.** AI search visibility tools are crowded: Aiolum also covers Otterly.AI, Promptmonitor and BrandAxis, which mainly track mentions; Cited.today differs by sending one article brief a weekday.
- **Dependence on model providers.** The privacy policy says Anthropic's Claude writes the questions and briefs and DataForSEO asks ChatGPT the questions. The terms say the company is "not affiliated with OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, Anthropic or Microsoft, and their answers change from one day to the next". A change in any of these services changes the product.

## Sources

1. Cited.today home page, read 6 November 2026 — https://www.cited.today/ (grade C). Read in full. Source for the product, the engines, the pricing table, the logos and the gethumaninbox.com results.
2. Cited.today: About, read 6 November 2026 — https://www.cited.today/about (grade C). Read in full. Source for the founder, his earlier companies, the July 2026 start of the method and the other products he runs.
3. Product Hunt: Cited.today, launched 21 October 2026 — https://www.producthunt.com/products/cited-today (grade C). Read the product page and the maker comment. Source for the launch date, the points and the founder's account of why he built it.
4. Cited.today: Privacy policy, read 6 November 2026 — https://www.cited.today/privacy (grade C). Read in full. Source for the AI providers, hosting, email, payments and analytics.
5. Cited.today: Terms, effective 21 October 2026 — https://www.cited.today/terms (grade C). Read in full. Source for the operating company, the billing through Stripe and the statement on AI engines.
6. Internet Archive copy of www.cited.today, 13 October 2026 — https://web.archive.org/web/20261013100938/https://www.cited.today/ (grade C). Read in full. Earliest capture; source for the first plans and prices.
7. Database of failed startups, local export — /method/#dead (grade C). Local export. AI-written summaries, not independently verified. Source for the failed predecessors.

Contact: aiolum@livyden.com. Run Cited.today? Send corrections or a verified figure to aiolum@livyden.com (subject: Correction: Cited.today).