Getting started

Welcome to CiteFlow. This guide walks you through your first thirty minutes: from signing up to your first published article. If you only read one page in these docs, make it this one.

CiteFlow is an AI visibility platform. It audits how well your site is positioned for traditional search, AI answer engines, and large language model citations, then helps you fix gaps with on-brand content that publishes straight to your CMS.

What will you do in this guide?

1. Verify your domain.
2. Run your first site audit.
3. Review and approve your knowledge base.
4. Generate your first article.
5. Connect a publishing destination.
6. Publish.

End to end this takes around thirty minutes of your attention, plus some unattended time while audits and generation run.

1. How do you verify your domain?

After signing up you will be asked for the website you want CiteFlow to work on. Add the full origin, including the protocol, for example https://example.com.

Domain verification is automatic for most sites: CiteFlow fetches your home page and confirms it responds with a 2xx status. If your site is behind a firewall, contact us before signing up so we can whitelist the CiteFlow crawler.

2. How do you run your first audit?

Once your domain is verified, CiteFlow queues your first audit automatically. The audit crawls your site, scores each page across three pillars (traditional SEO, answer engine optimisation, and large language model optimisation), and produces a prioritised action plan.

Audit duration depends on site size and complexity. A small site (under 50 pages) typically completes within 10 minutes. Medium sites (50 to 500 pages) can take 30 to 90 minutes. Large sites (500+ pages) may take several hours. You will receive an email notification when your audit completes, so you can leave the page in the meantime.

3. How do you review your knowledge base?

After your audit completes, CiteFlow automatically synthesises a draft knowledge base from your site content. This is the editorial source of truth for every article generated for your brand: voice, positioning, audience, products, and recurring claims with citations back to your own pages.

The draft appears in your dashboard automatically. Open it, read through, and edit anything that is not quite right. You must review and approve the knowledge base before content generation begins; this approval gate protects every future article from generic or off-brand output.

4. How do you generate your first article?

From the dashboard, open Content and pick a topic from the queue (CiteFlow seeds the queue from audit findings) or add one of your own. Submit the topic and an article enters the generation pipeline.

Each article goes through research, drafting, QA, and image generation. A typical article takes three to seven minutes to produce. You can review the draft, edit inline, and approve when ready.

5. How do you connect a publishing destination?

Before you can publish, connect at least one publishing endpoint. CiteFlow ships native adapters for WordPress, Ghost, Shopify, and Webflow, plus a custom HTTP webhook for everything else.

• Custom webhook: receive every article as a signed HTTP POST.
• WordPress: Application Password and the REST API.
• Ghost: Admin API key with JWT signing.
• Shopify: custom app with write_content scope.
• Webflow: Data API v2 token and a configured collection.

Every adapter creates the remote post as a draft. CiteFlow never publishes live without an explicit review step in your CMS. Use the "Test connection" button after adding an endpoint to confirm credentials before you depend on it.

6. How do you publish?

From the approved article, click Publish and pick one or more connected endpoints. CiteFlow dispatches the article and reports success or failure per destination. Failures retry automatically (three attempts with linear backoff), then surface for manual retry from the dashboard.

What happens next?

• Re-audits run automatically on your normal cadence. The audit detail page shows what changed since the previous run.
• Keyword tracking monitors positions for terms drawn from your audit and topic queue. Read keyword tracking for what positions mean and why they vary.
• AI citation tracking queries the leading answer engines for your brand on a schedule. See AI citation tracking for how this works and why your personal experience can differ.

How do you troubleshoot onboarding issues?

The audit has not started. Audits queue immediately but only one runs per workspace at a time on the Trial tier. If you have multiple sites, they run in sequence.

The audit is taking longer than expected. Large sites with deep link graphs can take several hours. The audit detail page shows live progress; if pages per minute drops to zero for more than two minutes, contact support.

Article generation failed. Generation occasionally fails on ambiguous topics. Edit the topic title to be more specific (for example "How to do X for Y audience") and re-queue.

My CMS is not in the list of adapters. Use the custom webhook endpoint. Any HTTP server that can verify an HMAC signature and accept JSON can receive CiteFlow articles. See Webhook contract.

Need help?

Email support: privacy@citeflow.co.uk. We aim to respond within one business day.