The metering contract
How citations are counted
A billable citation = one unique human visit referred from an AI assistant to your answer page. You're never charged for bots or for impressions — only for humans an AI sent you.
What counts as a citation
- A real browser visit lands on your Pay Per Answer answer page.
- The visit's referrer or entry source matches an AI assistant surface on our allowlist.
- The visitor is deduplicated — the same visitor (ip_hash + user-agent) hitting the same page inside a rolling window is counted as 1 citation, not many.
- Only then do we decrement your prepaid citation balance by 1.
AI surfaces we recognize
- • chatgpt.com / chat.openai.com (ChatGPT)
- • perplexity.ai (Perplexity)
- • gemini.google.com (Google Gemini)
- • copilot.microsoft.com & bing.com chat (Microsoft Copilot)
- • claude.ai (Anthropic Claude)
- • you.com (You.com)
- • deepseek.com (DeepSeek)
- • x.ai / grok (xAI Grok)
- • meta.ai (Meta AI)
The list expands as new AI answer surfaces emerge. Additions are additive — never retroactively billed.
What we do NOT bill
- AI crawler / bot retrievals (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, OAI-SearchBot, and similar). We surface these as a free authority/health signal — they are never billable events.
- Impressions or "your page was seen by an AI" — never billed.
- Duplicate visits within the rolling dedupe window.
- Non-AI traffic (organic Google, direct, social, email).
Enforcement, at the database layer
The rule isn't a policy — it's a constraint. A single trusted server function is the only path allowed to mark a citation billable. It rejects any source that isn't on the AI allowlist and enforces a unique-key guard on (customer + visitor + page + time-bucket) so double-counts are impossible by construction. Crawler bot rows go to a separate authority-metric table and can never flow through the billing path.
Coming soon (also honest)
Clicks, calls, and leads are priced and visible on our pricing page but are marked Coming soon and are not purchasable until each becomes verifiably tracked. We only sell what we can prove.