Case Study Zero
I run the method on myself first.
The fair test of a method is whether the person selling it has pointed it at their own business first. So before I quote a price, my own site is the first subject — the Citation Engine, run on patrickrobinson.consulting, in public, from a measured start.
Real before-and-after only. No sample data, no numbers a chatbot made up for a slide. The baseline below is a real zero, and it can't be quietly edited later.
Citation rate today
0/7
category buyer queries where an AI engine currently cites my work, across Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini.
Baseline measured . This number is the experiment — when it moves, you'll see it here first.
The series
Episode 01
The honest baseline
Why I run the Citation Engine on my own site before selling it to anyone — and the unflattering place I'm starting from: cited in zero of seven category buyer queries.
Episode 02
Upcoming
The first citation
Publishes the day an answer engine first cites my own work. Real before-and-after only — so this lands when there's a genuine after to show, not before.
Locked until the first citation lands. No teaser, no placeholder result — it publishes when there's something real to show.
1 of 2 episodes published. New episodes are triggered by real citation events, not a calendar.
The rules of this experiment
Real before-and-after only. The baseline is measured the same way I measure a client's: buyer-intent queries run across four answer engines, multiple times each. The "before" is a real zero.
Surface presence first, then citation-shaped depth. The same 30-60-90 sequence I'd hand a client — fast wins on the surfaces engines pull from, then the deeper, founder-bylined work that earns durable citations. The essays on this site are part of that depth.
In the open, where it can't be edited later. Each episode documents a real movement in the number above. If the method is good, it has to move a figure I published before I knew where it would land.
Want this run on your company?
The Citation Engine starts with the same audit I ran on myself — your citation rate across the four engines, benchmarked against your category, with the gaps and the fix mapped out.