CitedBy

CitedBy is an audit tool from Spain that crawls websites and reports what blocks or weakens their pages for AI search and search engines. Each issue comes with a ready-to-paste fix, and identical issues across many pages are grouped into one fix with a page count. A free check covers up to 10 pages without an account, and there are also single audits and subscriptions with recurring crawls. Click data can be connected via Google Search Console to rank fixes. The CitedBot crawler reads public pages only and does not run JavaScript.

The website and database are at Hetzner Online on servers in Finland, and payments run through Stripe Payments Europe in Ireland. The core assessment, however, relies on a US group: Anthropic receives the public text of crawled pages to assess them and write fixes, with possible transfer to Anthropic PBC in the US under standard contractual clauses. According to the privacy policy, the operator also uses Anthropic tools to read server logs, support mail and, read-only, account and payment records. On consumer plans, Anthropic acts as an independent controller in this context. Further US services include Resend for email, OpenRouter, PostHog as operator of the analytics in its EU cloud in Frankfurt, Google for nightly backups and Cloudflare for DNS lookups. Optionally, CitedBy reports URLs via IndexNow to search engines including Yandex from Russia, which stops when the key file is removed.

CitedBy checks whether robots.txt and firewalls allow crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, with one live request per crawler. It also covers indexing risks such as sitemap errors and duplicate text, as well as pages that stay empty without JavaScript. Broken links, redirect chains, slow and orphan pages and canonicals are part of the check too. For titles, headings and structured data, missing or duplicate entries are reported. The tool also records whether FAQ, pricing and comparison pages exist.