For twenty years, the deal was simple. You wrote a useful page, search engines ranked it, buyers read it, and on a good day, one of them turned into a customer. The whole industry — every analyst, every agency, every in-house team I worked on — got very good at that bargain.

Then, sometime in 2023, the bargain quietly ended. Half of the people who used to visit our pages started asking ChatGPT instead. They got one paragraph and two citations. If our name wasn't in that paragraph, we weren't considered — and the part that scared me, we weren't even seen.

I spent most of that year looking for someone serious to hand the problem to. The big SEO agencies were pivoting their decks. The new "AI-native" startups were selling dashboards. Nobody was doing the unglamorous work the models actually reward: primary research, named sources, editorial that earns its citation on merit.

So I started Citebound to do that work. A small studio. Senior people only. One discipline. We take a handful of companies through the same engagement: figure out which buyer prompts matter, produce the research and editorial that earns its way into the answer, then defend the position week after week. The score is public. The work is signed.

If you've read this far, you probably know whether your category is one where the answer paragraph already matters. If it does, we should talk.