Sited

The AI search gold rush has produced a familiar pattern: a new category, a wave of tools, and a subscription for every anxiety. Sited is the contrarian — a $50 one-time audit that tells you where your brand stands in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot, and then hands you a prioritized fix list. No dashboard to check daily, no monthly fee, no sales call. Just a point-in-time answer.

That positioning is more radical than it sounds. The category — call it GEO, or generative engine optimization — is being built on the assumption that brands need continuous monitoring to survive the shift from blue links to AI-generated answers. Sited's bet is that most companies don't need a live feed of their AI mentions; they need a clear-eyed assessment of whether AI systems can read their site, understand their business, and cite them as a source. That's a different problem, and it deserves a different tool.

The audit, not the dashboard

Sited's core product is a one-time audit that scores your site across six dimensions: AI crawlability, schema and structured data, citability signals, platform-specific analysis, brand mention intelligence, and technical GEO. The output is a PDF and Markdown report with prioritized fixes, each rated by impact. The free tier gives you a downloadable infographic of your AI presence, generated in under two minutes from just your URL — no account, no setup.

The contrast with the rest of the market is stark. Sited's own comparison page lists entry-tier prices for AI visibility platforms at around $99 per month, enterprise GEO tools at $250 per month, and agency retainers at $2,000 or more per project. That's roughly $1,188 for a year of the cheapest platform — about 24 Sited audits. The company is explicit about the tradeoff: if you need always-on monitoring, competitor benchmarking, and a dashboard your team logs into daily, buy a platform like Profound or Scrunch AI. Sited is for founders and small marketing teams who want to know where they stand right now, in plain English, without adding another subscription.

This is a deliberate wedge into the market. By positioning itself as the point-in-time alternative, Sited avoids competing on the platforms' turf — continuous monitoring — and instead owns the entry point. It's the tool you use before you decide whether you need a platform at all.

What Sited checks that SEO tools miss

Traditional SEO tools measure rankings, backlinks, and traffic. Sited is trying to measure something fuzzier: how AI systems perceive your brand. That means auditing not just whether your pages are crawlable, but whether they're structured in a way that AI systems can extract meaning from. The six dimensions reflect that.

AI crawlability checks robots.txt, server rendering, and response times — the technical prerequisites for being read at all. Schema and structured data audits your JSON-LD and Schema.org coverage, which helps AI systems understand what your business does. Citability signals analyze content depth and E-E-A-T signals, the trust markers that make AI systems comfortable citing you as a source. Platform-specific analysis scores you separately for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot, because each platform has its own crawlers and citation behaviors. Brand mention intelligence looks at how and where your brand appears in AI-generated responses — or doesn't. Technical GEO covers robots.txt directives, crawl budget, Core Web Vitals, and experimental signals like llms.txt and IndexNow.

The report doesn't just dump data; it prioritizes. Each issue comes with an impact rating, so you know whether to fix your schema markup or your page speed first. And because the report is delivered as Markdown, it's designed to be fed back into AI coding tools like Lovable, Replit, or Cursor. The workflow is explicit: upload the report, ask the tool to create a fix plan, implement, re-scan. Sited turns its audit into the input for an AI-driven remediation loop.

The anti-theatre stance as a differentiator

Sited's most interesting move is its willingness to tell you what doesn't work. The site includes a section titled "Most 'AI visibility' tactics are theatre," which separates what Google confirms matters from what it explicitly debunks. Evidence-backed tactics include crawlable server-rendered pages, unique expert content, standard Schema.org markup, and genuine authority. Plausible experiments — labeled as such — include llms.txt, IndexNow, and answer-first formatting. Unsupported claims, which Sited says agencies sell as "AI optimization," include special AI markup, artificially chunking content, rewriting your site for generative AI, and manufacturing brand mentions.

The source is Google's own AI optimization guide, which states: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, markup, or Markdown to appear in Google Search." Sited is essentially building its credibility on being the tool that doesn't sell you snake oil. That's a smart position in a category rife with hype, but it also means Sited is betting that honesty is a differentiator customers will pay for. The risk is that the market rewards tools that promise more, not less. But for a founder who's been burned by a $2,000 agency deck full of unsupported tactics, Sited's candor could be exactly the right pitch.

One payment versus the subscription reflex

The pricing page is a study in contrast. Sited charges $50, once, for the full report. No recurring fees, no annual billing, no hidden costs. The comparison table is blunt: platforms charge from $99 per month, enterprise tools from $250 per month, agencies from $2,000 per project. Sited's year-one cost is $50. The others are $1,188, $3,000, and $2,000+, respectively.

This is a classic disruption play — undercut the incumbents on price and simplicity. But it's also a strategic choice about who Sited wants as customers. Founders and small marketing teams don't want to justify a monthly subscription to their CFO; they want a one-time answer. Sited's launch pricing, with a countdown timer and a limit of 50 early-access reports, adds urgency. The founder, Jay, is directly accessible for questions — a white-glove touch that's rare at this price point.

The tradeoff is that Sited doesn't offer ongoing value. Once you've run your audit and fixed the issues, there's no reason to come back until something changes — a new AI platform launches, or Google updates its algorithms. That's fine for a point-in-time assessment, but it means Sited's revenue model depends on a steady stream of new customers, not recurring subscriptions. The company seems to accept that, positioning itself as the entry point to a category that will eventually require more.

From visibility to agent readiness

Sited's long-term vision is bigger than AI search visibility. The site argues that AI search is becoming agentic: "Soon the question won't just be 'does ChatGPT mention you?', it'll be 'can an autonomous agent complete work on your site?'" That means finding your pricing, reading your policies, using your API, and buying from you. Sited calls this "Agent Readiness" and has made it an experimental section in every full report.

The dimensions of agent readiness — structured navigation, complete documentation, API discoverability, explicit ownership, downloadable resources, machine-readable policies — are a natural extension of the audit. If AI systems are going to act on your behalf, they need to be able to navigate your site like a human would, but with more precision. Sited is positioning itself to measure that, too.

This is a forward-looking bet that could pay off. As AI agents become more common, the question of whether your site is agent-compatible will become as important as whether it's search-visible. Sited is staking a claim to that future while building credibility in the present. For now, the free infographic and $50 report are a low-risk way to find out where you stand. The question is whether Sited can convince enough founders that a one-time audit is worth more than a subscription — and that honesty about what doesn't work is a feature, not a limitation.