The shift we're betting on
Buyers used to type two words into Google and click around. Today they ask a conversational AI — "best lightweight tent for backpacking under £200, must be free-standing" — and they buy from the model's first recommendation. The shopping funnel is collapsing into a single answer.
That answer is decided by a small number of LLMs, citing a small number of authoritative sources. If your store isn't in the citation graph — the Reddit threads, the Trustpilot pages, the listicles, the news mentions — you don't appear. Most merchants have no way of knowing whether they're in or out.
Platforms are racing to get your catalogue into that answer — and that's a good thing. But being present isn't being picked. When the AI lists three “popular options”, the fight that decides the sale is which one it recommends — and that fight is won off your own site, in the citation graph. Measuring it, and telling you how to win it, is the whole job CitoRank does.
Why we built CitoRank
We're operators ourselves. Lincado Ltd runs a real, transactional e-commerce business alongside CitoRank, and we kept hitting the same wall: no tool would tell us what AI actually said about our products. The handful of "GEO" tools we tried either guessed from third-party data, locked the interesting models behind enterprise contracts, or stopped at "you rank #4" without telling us how to climb.
So we built the thing we needed. CitoRank queries ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini directly; on its web-grounded tiers, ChatGPT and Claude use live web search to pull real evidence from Trustpilot, Reddit, news and brand sites, and it gives you the exact list of authority sources you need to land in to climb the recommendation rankings.
Where we come from
We're not an SEO agency that discovered e-commerce, and we're not an AI startup hunting for a use case. We manage a real store, and we've done its SEO ourselves for years.
The team behind CitoRank has been building software and selling online for over 25 years — as entrepreneurs and developers, on our own ventures and for companies across the UK and US. Today that means running Leisureshopdirect.com, a long-established UK online retailer in the caravan and outdoor-leisure market: a transactional store with a deep catalogue, real customers and real competitors. Before that, we built and ran a UK campsite directory and booking site from the ground up. Title tags, structured data, category architecture, reviews, "best of" lists — we've spent years doing that work on our own listings, not billing it by the hour on someone else's.
That background is the product. When CitoRank tells you which Reddit thread is pushing a competitor above you, or which JSON-LD field is stopping ChatGPT from parsing your price, it's because those are exactly the things we needed to know about our own store — and no tool would tell us. The approach is measurable, too: Leisureshopdirect currently earns over 150,000 generative-AI impressions a month in Google Search Console.
Why Shopify only
Shopify is where the merchants are, and the Admin API gives us everything we need to solve the cold-start problem: we auto-generate keyword prompts from your real catalogue rather than asking you to type them in. No CSV imports. No keyword research. Install and the first audit runs the same day.
Billing goes through Shopify too — one line on your existing invoice, cancel anytime from your admin, no separate vendor contracts to chase. We chose the constraint because it makes everything else simpler for the people we're serving.
What you can expect from us
Honest pricing. Evidence-based recommendations, never hallucinated ones. Real engineering behind every number on your dashboard. And a team that ships rather than waits — if you flag something broken, you'll usually hear from a human, not a ticket bot.