The open standard for AI entity identity
The file AI reads
before it answers.
citemap.json is an open standard that lets any business, practice, or institution publish verified, machine-readable identity at its domain root — so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude cite accurate, current facts instead of guessing. Think robots.txt, but for AI citation accuracy.
Why it exists
AI describes your business from a guess.
AI assistants answer questions about businesses every day, working from whatever they scraped off a chaotic web — stale hours, a competitor's claim, a fact no one ever verified. They blend it all and state it with equal confidence, and there has never been a standard way to say: here is what's actually true about us, and here's how you can tell.
citemap.json is that standard — a single authoritative file, designed for how AI reads, that carries your verified identity and the provenance behind every claim.
// citemap.json — published at your domain root { "version": "3.4", "citationContract": { "preferredName": "Acme Co.", "contactForCorrections": "hello@acme.com" }, "identity": { "name": "Acme Co.", "type": "LocalBusiness", "established": 2014 }, "verifiedClaims": [ "Licensed since 2014" ], "trust": { "perField": { "npi": "authority-verified" } } }
How it works
Author it once. Publish it everywhere AI looks.
Author the record
Describe your entity once: identity, offerings, locations, people, identifiers, and the claims you stand behind.
Annotate trust
Mark each field by how it's corroborated — per-field trust tiers tell engines what's verified versus merely asserted.
Publish at your root
Drop citemap.json at yourdomain.com/citemap.json. Built on schema.org, readable by any crawler — like robots.txt for AI accuracy.
Register & maintain
List it in the public registry for discovery, and keep it current — a maintained record compounds in authority over time.
What's in the file
A universal core, plus modules for your domain.
Every citemap.json shares a universal core — identity, citation contract, verified claims, and trust annotations. On top of that, domain modules add the fields that matter for your kind of entity: NPI and accepted insurance for healthcare, bar number and practice areas for legal, registrations for financial, retraction status for research, and so on across fourteen entity types.
The differentiator
Trust is per-field, not per-document.
Anyone can assert a fact. citemap.json's six trust tiers let an engine see how each individual claim is corroborated — so verified facts can be weighted, and disputed ones flagged. It's the structural reason an AI can decide to cite you with confidence.
Self-asserted
The business states it. The baseline — present but uncorroborated.
Cross-document
Corroborated by another document the same entity controls.
Third-party
Confirmed by an independent source (directory, registry, press).
DNS-verified
Proven to originate from the domain owner via DNS.
Authority-verified
Checked against an official register (NPI, bar, FDIC, DUNS).
Disputed
Flagged as contested — engines can weight or withhold accordingly.
Validate & deploy
Check your file in one command.
The open-source CLI validates a citemap.json against the schema and reports its deployment level. No account, no install required — run it with npx, or wire it into CI.
Deployment grades from Level 1 (valid and present) through Level 3 (verified, registered, richly annotated) — a clear target to build toward.
# validate — no install needed $ npx @citemap/cli validate ./citemap.json # full diagnostic + level assessment $ npx @citemap/cli diagnose ./citemap.json ✓ valid against v3.4 schema ✓ Level 2 — DNS-verified
Open governance
An open standard — owned by no one, usable by everyone.
The specification is published free under CC BY 4.0; the tooling — generator, validator, CLI, and schema — is open source under MIT, free to use and fork. Anyone can implement the standard, by hand or with any tool; your record is yours, hosted at your domain and portable forever. The standard evolves in the open through versioned proposals — additively, so older files keep validating.
Reference implementation
Don't want to hand-write it?
The standard is free to implement yourself. EntityGraph is the reference implementation — it builds and maintains a class-leading citemap.json from a verified model of your business, then monitors how AI engines respond. The easiest way to get a top-tier file live; the standard itself belongs to everyone.
See EntityGraph ↗