CitedOS measures ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, DeepSeek, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity today, read through their official APIs: ChatGPT on every plan, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews included on Growth and Agency Growth, and any engine your plan leaves out added à la carte at $50/mo each. CitedOS never scrapes the consumer chatbots: that's brittle and against their terms. The only scraping is of the public source pages the engines cite. The free audit checks ChatGPT; every other engine is measured only on a plan that includes it or has bought it as an add-on.
The engines — how each one is read
| Engine | How CitedOS reads it | What it parses |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | OpenAI web-search tool (API surface — a proxy) | Answer text + cited URLs; fan-out is simulated and validated |
| Gemini | google_search grounding tool | groundingMetadata: real sub-queries, source URIs/titles, text→source mapping |
| Claude | Claude web-search tool | url_citation annotations with start/end text spans |
| Grok | xAI API | Answer text and any sources the model cites |
| DeepSeek | DeepSeek API (model knowledge — no live web search) | Answer text only; parametric, so no live citations — labelled as such |
| Perplexity | Perplexity Sonar API | Answer text + cited source URLs |
| Google AI Overviews | Licensed SERP data (not an answer API — tagged API surface: SERP) | The ai_overview block's prose + its cited references, per market |
Grounding metadata
For Gemini and Claude, the APIs return which part of the answer each source supports. CitedOS parses Gemini's groundingSupports (text→source mapping) and webSearchQueries (the real sub-queries the engine fanned out into), and Claude's citation spans. This is how the answer feed can show you exactly which source backed which claim.
Why no consumer-app scraping
- Scraping the consumer chatbots violates their terms of service and is technically brittle — it breaks on every UI change.
- The official APIs return clean, structured citations and grounding metadata that a scraped screen never could.
- The one thing CitedOS does scrape — via a managed scraping API — is the public web pages the engines cite (G2, blogs, Reddit, docs). Those feed Module 2.
Fan-out — the way an engine rewrites one prompt into several sub-queries — is tracked where the API exposes it. See the glossary for fan-out, grounding and related terms.