How we tier-coded 800 AI search citations (and re-coded 174 of them)

Last quarter I sat down with a junior on our team and watched her build a citation tracker in a spreadsheet for the third time that month. The fourth time, I stopped pretending we had a system. We had a habit. Habits and systems are not the same thing. What we had was a growing pile of screenshots from Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Gemini, plus a Notion page where each of us had been informally rating the citation quality of pieces we'd written or co-written for B2B SaaS client