Citeroom

Citeroom is an answer engine optimization tool designed specifically for newsrooms and journalists aiming to have their reporting cited by AI assistants and answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews, Gemini, and Claude. It focuses on structuring news content to increase the likelihood that AI-generated answers will quote the original reporting and link back to the source. The platform is free, open source, and delivered as a WordPress plugin, allowing easy installation without requiring developer intervention, migration, or theme changes.

The core features in the free plugin include the automatic addition of clean NewsArticle structured data with publisher, author, section, and dateline information, alongside conflict detection to prevent schema clashes with existing SEO plugins like Rank Math and Yoast. Citeroom generates a live Google News sitemap of recent stories and displays an updated date only when a story has genuinely changed, avoiding artificial timestamp updates. The tool provides an answer readiness check, scoring how easily an AI can extract a direct answer from each story and offering guidance on improving ledes, headings, and structure. txt file to direct AI crawlers to key reporting and offers one-click controls to welcome or block AI crawlers.

For newsrooms seeking advanced capabilities, Citeroom Pro is available as an add-on requiring the free plugin. Pro features include citation tracking to monitor whether AI assistants actually cite the newsroom’s reporting, an AI visibility dashboard showing brand mentions, sentiment, and evidence behind citations, and an AI answer review tool that uses the user’s own AI key to suggest lede rewrites for greater quotability. Additional Pro features are advanced schema for original reporting, live blogs, and fact checks; entity grounding to link publications and journalists to verified identities; byline support for co-reported stories; and bulk actions to apply Citeroom across an entire archive. Pro licensing covers all news sites owned by the licensee.

Citeroom is built to run alongside existing SEO plugins without conflict and is developed by Nagaland Me. The free plugin operates entirely on the user’s own server with no external data calls, while Pro uses only AI keys provided by the user and sends them only to the selected provider.