> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.linkstonic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# TrueTrace: Deep AI Citability Audit for Your Brand
> TrueTrace audits your brand or URLs against AI engines to reveal your citability score, citation gaps, and exactly where AI models ignore you.
TrueTrace is Linkstonic's flagship AI visibility audit. While keyword tracking tells you whether your brand appears in AI answers, TrueTrace tells you *why* — and what to fix. It evaluates your content's structure, authority signals, and topical coverage against the criteria AI models use when deciding what to cite. Instead of guessing why Claude or Perplexity skips your site, you get a scored analysis with specific, actionable gaps.
## Analysis modes
TrueTrace offers three modes depending on what you want to audit.
URL Mode analyzes a single page to assess how likely it is to be cited by AI engines.
Use this mode when you want to evaluate a specific piece of content — a product page, a blog post, or a landing page — before or after publishing. TrueTrace scores the page's citability, identifies structural and topical weaknesses, and tells you exactly what to change.
**When to use it:** Auditing a new page before launch, diagnosing a page that isn't being cited despite ranking in traditional search, or validating content improvements.
**Available on:** Pro and Agency plans.
Brand Mode scores your brand's overall AI visibility across all supported engines for a set of queries you define. This is the most popular TrueTrace mode.
Instead of analyzing a single page, it evaluates how AI models respond to your brand-relevant queries and how prominently — or not — your brand appears. You get a brand-level citability score, a full citation source list, and gap analysis across your keyword set.
**When to use it:** Getting a comprehensive picture of your brand's AI presence, identifying which topics you're losing to competitors, or establishing a baseline before an optimization campaign.
**Available on:** Pro and Agency plans.
Competitor Mode lets you analyze two or more URLs side by side, comparing their citability scores, citation signals, and content gaps directly.
This is useful when you know a competitor is being cited more often than you are and want to understand specifically what they're doing differently. You can compare your page against a competitor's page on the same topic and see a detailed breakdown of where they outperform you.
**When to use it:** Benchmarking your content against a competitor who ranks higher in AI answers, identifying structural or topical advantages they have, or validating content rewrites.
**Available on:** Agency plan only.
## Quick vs Hybrid analysis
TrueTrace offers two analysis depths. Choose based on how much detail you need and how quickly you need it.
Quick Mode runs a single AI model against your input and returns results in under 10 seconds.
**What you get:**
* LLM Citability Score (0–100)
* Top quick wins — the highest-impact changes you can make immediately
* Keyword gap detection — topics your content is missing that AI models expect to see
**Best for:** Fast checks, validating a single change, or when you need a directional signal without waiting for a full analysis.
Hybrid Mode runs multi-model validation across platforms and cross-references results for a more complete and reliable picture.
**What you get:**
* Everything in Quick Mode
* Cross-platform comparison across AI engines
* Full citation source list
* AI mention probability percentage
* FAQ content gap analysis — specific questions AI models expect your content to answer
**Best for:** In-depth audits, content strategy decisions, and situations where you need high confidence in the results before making significant changes.
## What TrueTrace reports
After an audit completes, you'll see the following in your results:
**LLM Citability Score**
A score from 0 to 100 that represents how likely AI models are to cite your page or brand. Higher scores correlate with more frequent and prominent citations across platforms.
**Citation source list**
A list of the sources AI models currently cite when answering queries relevant to your brand. Use this to understand which pages — yours or competitors' — are winning citations and why.
**FAQ gap analysis**
The specific questions AI models expect content on your topic to answer, which your page currently doesn't address. Filling these gaps directly improves citability.
**Sentiment analysis**
How AI models describe your brand when they do mention it — positive, neutral, or negative framing. Useful for identifying narrative issues in addition to visibility gaps.
**Feedback loop**
After your audit, you can mark whether an AI actually cited your page in response to real queries. This data feeds into TrueTrace's accuracy tracking so your scores improve over time with real-world signal.
**Historical tracking**
TrueTrace saves your audit results over time so you can track how your citability score and gaps change as you make improvements to your content.
## How to run TrueTrace
In the Linkstonic dashboard, navigate to **AI Visibility** and select **TrueTrace** from the sidebar.
Select **URL Mode**, **Brand Mode**, or **Competitor Mode** depending on what you want to audit. If Competitor Mode is grayed out, it requires an Agency plan.
Select **Quick Mode** for fast results or **Hybrid Mode** for a full cross-platform audit.
Depending on the mode you selected, enter the page URL, your brand name and target queries, or the URLs you want to compare.
Once the audit completes, review your LLM Citability Score, citation sources, and gap analysis. Use the Feedback Loop to log real-world citation outcomes and track progress over time.
TrueTrace is available on Pro and Agency plans. URL Mode and Brand Mode are included in both. Competitor Mode — which compares two or more URLs side by side — is exclusive to the Agency plan.