title: "How Refly got cited 20× more often in ChatGPT in six weeks" slug: "how-refly-got-cited-20x" date: "2026-04-10" author: "AIRank" category: "Case Studies" excerpt: "A short case study on Refly, the AI writing workspace, and exactly which three changes moved their citation rate from 1.2 per 100 queries to 24.5." featured: false
Refly is a Hong Kong–based AI writing and research workspace. Small team, strong product, zero traditional-SEO investment. When they connected to AIRRNK in February 2026, their citation rate across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity was 1.2 per 100 relevant queries — effectively invisible.
Six weeks later, that number was 24.5 per 100. This is what changed.
Baseline
The initial scan flagged three issues that together accounted for the bulk of the gap:
- No
llms.txtat the root. The crawlers were guessing at site structure from the sitemap, which is mostly generated app routes. - No FAQ schema anywhere. A product this category-defining (a workspace for AI-assisted research, which is exactly what users ask ChatGPT about) was leaving the highest-hit-rate schema on the table.
- Buried unique claims. Refly's most distinctive capability — real-time co-editing between a human and an AI agent with full revision history — was described in a marketing paragraph on the homepage. It wasn't a chunk. It wasn't extractable. No model was going to quote it.
The three changes
Week 1. Shipped llms.txt with a one-sentence description ("Refly is an AI-native research workspace where you and a Claude-powered agent co-edit a document in real time, with full revision history."), a curated list of fourteen high-signal URLs, and a matching llms-full.txt with the full docs inlined.
Week 2. Added FAQPage schema to the homepage and four feature pages. Seven questions total, each with a 40–80 word answer. We picked the questions by scraping r/artificial, r/ChatGPT, and Reddit's r/writing for recurring phrasings around "AI writing tool with versioning" — which was Refly's strongest differentiator.
Week 3–4. Wrote eight short articles, each around 500 words, each built around a single unique claim that only Refly could credibly make. Examples: "Refly saves 340 document versions per active user per month" (a real stat from their product analytics), "Refly is the only writing workspace where the AI agent has its own named cursor". Each claim got its own chunk: blockquote, surrounded by context, with a clean H2.
Weeks 5–6. Seeded three of those articles into Hacker News and two developer subreddits, on the back of the product itself (not as marketing). Two caught fire. One hit front page of HN. That single thread produced a measurable 2.8× bump in Claude citations within 72 hours, which is the fastest we've seen a single mention propagate.
The numbers
| Metric | Week 0 | Week 6 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT citations / 100 queries | 1.2 | 24.5 | 20.4× |
| Claude citations / 100 queries | 0.8 | 19.1 | 23.9× |
| Perplexity citations / 100 queries | 3.4 | 31.2 | 9.2× |
| AI Score (AIRRNK rubric) | 38 / 100 | 82 / 100 | +44 |
A disproportionate share of the lift came from Claude. This is consistent with what we see across our customer base: Claude's retrieval layer is the most aggressive about citing the attributed source of a claim, so unique-claim writing moves the needle fastest there.
The general lesson
You do not need a lot of content. You need a handful of chunks, each saying something only you can say, in sentences short enough to be quoted. Ship llms.txt, ship FAQ schema, and write eight paragraphs that nobody else on the internet could have written. That was the entire playbook.
Six weeks. One engineer, half-time.
If you want the AIRRNK-generated before-and-after audit from Refly's account as a reference, email us — we'll share the redacted PDF. Run your own free scan.