The front door to finding a professional quietly changed.

For most of the internet's life, getting found meant one thing: ranking on Google. Firms spent two decades and real money learning to play that game.

Then, almost overnight, the game changed. People started asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini the questions they used to type into a search bar. The AI answers with a short list of names, and the firms on that list win the client before a single blue link ever loads.

I spent the last year at Brown studying how technology reshapes the way people find information and make decisions. The pattern was impossible to unsee: AI assistants had become the new front door, and almost no professional firm was ready for it.

CiteBird exists to close that gap. We find out whether the AI is citing you, and then we do the work to make sure it does, the same way SEO once got firms onto Google.