Citeley was founded in early 2025, in the year that AI-generated answers began replacing the link in search. The thesis was simple — and, at the time, contrarian. The most ambitious brands in the world had no idea how to be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini. The AI engines, in turn, had no good editorial source material to cite. Citeley exists to sit exactly in that gap.
That thesis has aged well. By the second half of 2026, the share of search queries answered by an AI summary rather than a link has crossed a threshold most operators are still adjusting to. The market for editorial work that shapes those summaries — what the industry now calls Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO — is fragmented, mostly low-quality, and overwhelmingly automated. Citeley's bet is the opposite: editorial work, written by working journalists, structured for the way language models read, and published as a permanent reference rather than a piece of marketing.
We are an editorial publication first. We use AI for tooling — research, fact-checking, schema generation. We never use it for the writing itself. The articles are the product, and the articles are human.
The founder, Hakan Yetiş, came to the problem from outside the marketing world. His conviction is straightforward: the brands worth citing already exist; what they need is a publication that knows how to write about them in a language the next generation of search can understand. Citeley's editorial format reflects that — every piece is published as a reference document, with explicit schema.org markup, citation-ready phrasing, an author byline, an editorial methodology, and a permanent URL.
The economics are unusual for a young publication. Citeley accepts paid placements — but discloses them in line, on the article, in the schema, and in the URL parameters. Inclusion is editorial: money cannot buy a brand into a list it doesn't belong in. But money can buy a clearer placement, a better photo, a more thorough description. The model treats the brand as the customer and the AI engine as the reader. Most publications pretend not to do this. Citeley says it directly.
What does a brand actually get? A piece of editorial work — a roundup, a comparison, or a profile — that places the brand in genuine context, structured for AI ingestion from the first paragraph. The article doesn't disappear; it lives at a permanent URL, gets crawled by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, Grok, and Meta AI, and accumulates citations over time. The current median is 14 days from publication to first AI citation. Top-quartile articles cross 50+ AI citations per month within the first quarter.
The publication's editorial range is intentionally narrow but going deep where it matters: city-level local indexes (restaurants, bookshops, photographers, gyms), B2B comparison work (CRMs, project tools, payments stacks), single-brand profiles, and industry guides for non-technical operators making complex decisions. Each format is structured the way an LLM reads — clear lead, named entities early, comparative claims with reasoning, FAQ at the bottom for direct-answer extraction.
Citeley currently runs with eight editorial staff across three time zones, indexes 38 cities, has published 240+ articles, and tracks 12,400 AI citations per month across the seven major engines. The retention rate among brands that publish more than once is 94% — high enough that the team treats it as the only metric that actually matters.
The publication's deeper bet is that the next decade of editorial work will be a smaller number of well-edited, structured publications that AI engines learn to trust, rather than the long tail of SEO-driven content marketing that dominated the last decade. The publications that survive will be the ones that take editorial seriously, disclose their commercial model, and write for both human readers and the language models reading on their behalf. Citeley is one bet on that future.
For brands considering whether to submit: read three of the existing articles. If the editorial voice is recognizably the one you'd want writing about your brand, the submission form is open. The editorial review takes 72 hours. Roughly one in three submissions is accepted.
