Why Known&Cited — and not Peec AI, OtterlyAI, Semrush or a PR agency?

So, why choose Known & Cited over Peec AI, OtterlyAI, Semrush or one of the big UK PR agencies that have built their own products?

Not because they aren’t good at what they do, but because we sit somewhere in between. We are not another AI/GEO dashboard. We are not another PR agency bolting on GEO to existing services…

On the way to hospital this morning, Ben Hobkinson (fellow new business founder, wonderful chap and general asker of good questions) asked me for my elevator pitch — but with different, better wording. I rambled. I was trying to parallel park at the time, which I’m shit at at the best of times. Then the phone cut out. All in all, it wasn’t great.

It stuck in my head though, so here’s the version I should have given.

The short version

There it is. That’s what I should have said in the car.

But “what” we do is only half of it. Plenty of companies will sell you AI visibility data right now — Peec AI, OtterlyAI, Semrush, Profound, Otterly, Goodie, Brandrank, and more arriving every month. And plenty of PR agencies have now added “AI” or “GEO” to their service menus. The reason K&C exists, and the reason we’re growing, is how we do it — and who’s doing it.

Six things that make K&C different

1. We’re people plus amazing tech

We use the best AI visibility tracking tech on the market. We measure thousands of AI prompts, across multiple LLMs — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews — against structured scoring frameworks. The data is rigorous.

But we’re not a tech company. We’re a services company that uses tech to do the job properly. That matters because data on its own doesn’t move the needle. Someone has to read it, interpret it, and tell you what to do next. Otherwise you’re staring at a dashboard going “right… so what?”

K&C gives you the data, the interpretation, and the plan. The tech is the foundation. The people are the product.

2. We tell you where you are, why, and what to do next

Half the tools in the AI visibility space will tell you where you stand. Fewer will tell you why. Almost none will tell you what to do about it — or actually do it with you.

Our AI Visibility Strategy (AVS) starts with a score: where you rank today across AI platforms, how you stack up against competitors, what sources AI is citing, where your gaps are. That’s the “where you are”.

Then comes the why: which publications are feeding AI’s answers, which narratives your competitors own and you don’t, which pillars of citation authority you’re weakest on.

Then the roadmap: what content to create, which publications to target, which stories to tell, which gaps to close first. If you want, we’ll execute the plan for you — content, GEO advisory, PR connections. If you’d rather do it yourself or with your existing agencies, we’ll hand over a plan specific enough to follow without us. Either works.

3. We’re not another complicated dashboard

There’s a real pattern in this space: “buy our dashboard, log in daily, watch the graphs go up and down, try to work out what to do about it.” Peec AI, OtterlyAI, Profound, Otterly, Goodie, Brandrank — all good tools. All assume you’ve got in-house capacity to interpret what they surface. Most businesses don’t.

K&C reports are built to be read once, understood, and acted on. An AVS Annual means you get the full picture once a year. Bi-Annual is twice a year. Quarterly is every three months. In between, there’s a real person at the end of the phone when you need us.

We don’t think AI visibility is a problem you solve by logging in more often. It’s a problem you solve by doing the right things a small number of times.

4. Built by a PR specialist and a copywriter — not tech bros or SEO providers

I spent almost 20 years in PR before K&C. Katy, our in-house copywriter, is a career content specialist. That background isn’t incidental — it’s the whole point.

The businesses currently winning in AI are the ones with strong third-party citation trails: trade press coverage, analyst mentions, journalist quotes, authoritative long-form content. That’s PR and content. It’s what we know how to do.

The alternative stable of GEO providers tends to come from two backgrounds: SEO agencies adding “AI” to their existing service menu, and tech-first startups building dashboards without a service layer. Neither group was building brand positioning for a living before AI arrived. We were.

If you’re a brand or agency thinking about AI visibility, the question to ask any provider is: do they understand how brands actually get cited? If the answer is “our algorithm tracks citations” — fine, so does ours. If the answer is “we’ve been building citation strategies for brands for twenty years, and now we’re doing it for AI” — that’s the one you want.

5. GEO + PR, with a real team — not a daily dashboard and a chatbot

GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is the discipline of getting recommended by AI. It sits squarely between SEO, PR, and content marketing. Most providers lean hard into the SEO angle. A few lean into the tech angle. Almost none lean into PR.

But the biggest single lever in AI visibility is third-party citations — who’s saying what about you, in the places AI reads. That’s a PR problem. We treat it that way.

K&C’s model: the tech measures. A real team interprets and strategises. When it’s time to shift the needle, we plug into the PR and content disciplines we’ve spent our careers inside. You talk to a human, quarterly or bi-annually. Not a chatbot.

6. Tailored to your business — not subscription-and-a-prayer

There are three standard AVS tiers — Annual (£2,750), Bi-Annual (£4,750), Quarterly (£8,000). Prices are clear. But the work inside each is shaped to the client. A law firm needs a different query set to a DTC brand. A multi-country SaaS has different competitive landscapes to a local business. A charity has different success metrics to an agency.

We don’t run the same 400 prompts at every client and hope the plan that comes out of it is relevant. We design the query set to match the business, the competitors, and the actual buyer journey. The outputs are tailored. So are the roadmaps.

And we’ll scope AI Consultancy, GEO Advisory, Discovery sessions, and copywriting around whatever you actually need — not around what fits into a pre-set subscription slot.

Where we sit in the landscape

There are three broad categories of provider showing up in the AI visibility space right now.

Dashboard-only tools. Peec AI, OtterlyAI, Semrush’s AI visibility reports, Profound, Otterly, Goodie, Brandrank and others. They give you numbers. They don’t give you a plan. Great if you have an in-house team who can translate data into action. Less great if you’re a small or mid-size business without that capacity.

Big UK PR agencies with their own AI products, or SEO agencies with a GEO bolt-on. Most large agencies have now added “GEO” or “AI visibility” to their service list — some with internal tools, some white-labelling the dashboards above. Two problems: for the SEO-led ones, AI visibility isn’t primarily a technical SEO problem, and bolting it onto an SEO mindset misses the point. For the PR agency-led ones, the measurement layer is usually thin or borrowed — you pay premium retainer rates for strategy that lacks the data spine.

Known & Cited. Services business, real humans, powered by the best tech, built by people who’ve spent their careers getting brands cited by third parties. We sell a score — but we sell the story around the score, and the plan to change it.

If you want a dashboard, there are plenty of those. If you want an SEO or PR agency with an “AI” tab, there are plenty of those too. If you want a PR-and-content-led team who understand how AI platforms actually form their recommendations, and will help you move from invisible to recommended — that’s us.

The pitch I should have given Ben

That’s the version I’ll be using next time. Parallel parking is still going to be dreadful. But at least the elevator pitch will be tight.

If you want to try us

The AVS Flash is free — 25 prompts, a real snapshot of where your brand stands in AI today. If it’s useful, the full AVS goes deeper: AVS Annual £2,750, Bi-Annual £4,750, Quarterly £8,000. We’ll beat any comparable service by 10%.

Focus. Measure. Plan. Deliver. Repeat. That’s the model.

Be Known. Be Cited. — Russ