FAQ
The questions people ask in their first week.
Setup, publishing, results and billing. If your question is a specific error message, the troubleshooting page lists those verbatim.
Getting started
Do I have to connect a website before anything happens?
No. Citeca researches, plans and writes without a connection, and the articles sit in your calendar. A connection is only needed for them to reach your site — and you can publish the backlog the moment you add one.
What if my platform is not supported?
Two options. Blog hosting puts your articles on blog.yourdomain.com with a single DNS record, or the webhook and API connectors hand you the article payload to render however you like.
Can I connect more than one site?
Yes, and you can connect several destinations at once. Publishing sends the article to all of them and reports each one separately.
How much of my time does this need?
Setup is about fifteen minutes. After that, nothing, unless you want to approve drafts or act on a backlink item that needs a human to send it.
Content and publishing
Can I read articles before they go public?
Yes. Set the connection to save as draft and nothing becomes public until you press Publish. Articles arrive in your CMS as drafts, so you can also review them there.
What happens if I edit an article after it is live?
Press Publish again and the post already on your site is updated in place. Same URL, no duplicate, no second entry competing with the first.
Can I take an article back off my site?
Yes — Unpublish reverts it to a draft everywhere it was published. Nothing is deleted, and publishing again puts it back on the same URL.
Who owns the content?
You do, outright. It is on your domain, in your CMS, and it stays yours if you leave.
Why does my published article look unstyled?
Citeca sends semantic HTML and your theme styles it. If headings and spacing look wrong, the article is fine and the theme has no styles for that content — usually a CMS template question.
Results
How long until an AI engine cites me?
Long-tail and low-competition prompts commonly turn over inside two to three months. Competitive commercial prompts take longer, because engines favour sources that are already referenced elsewhere, and that has to be built.
How do you know whether an engine cited me?
Your prompts are re-run across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI on a schedule, and the responses are recorded — whether you were named, in what position, and who was named instead.
Is this different from SEO?
It overlaps and then diverges. Both need crawlable, credible, well-structured pages. SEO competes for a click on a results page; being cited means being the source an assistant quotes, where there is no results page and often no click at all.
Will this help my normal Google rankings too?
Usually yes. Published articles on real questions, technical fixes and genuine backlinks are the same foundations classic SEO runs on. Site traffic shows Google and AI-engine visits side by side.
Account and billing
Can I export everything?
Your articles are already on your own site, in your own CMS. The API also exposes articles and backlinks for anything else you want to pull.
What happens to published articles if I cancel?
They stay exactly where they are. They are posts in your CMS, not hosted content that disappears with the subscription.
Can I pause instead of cancelling?
Yes. Turning off auto-publish stops anything reaching your site while keeping your calendar, history and tracking intact.
Still stuck?
Use the assistant in the bottom-right of the dashboard — it can see your account, your connections and your recent publishes, which makes it considerably faster than describing them.
Something missing or wrong here? Tell us and we will fix it.