Authority & Citation Programme: become the source others quote

It is £1,250, one-off. That covers choosing the question, one free online tool built and tested, a stats page with every number sourced and dated, 8-10 FAQs, an anonymised open dataset published with a DOI, the allowed-facts check and a refresh plan. Hosting the tool on your existing site adds nothing. It is also part of the AI Search Growth bundle with Programmatic Local SEO and the monitor.

Because it answers a question their readers have, and linking is easier than building their own. A cost calculator, a licence checker or a "how long should this take" tool gets linked from forums, local guides and trade blogs for years. GigXchange runs 16 free tool pages - invoice and contract generators, a rate calculator, a licensing checker - because each one answers a real question nobody else answered well.

A DOI is a permanent citation number for a piece of research or data, the same kind academic papers use. Publishing your anonymised dataset on Zenodo gives it one for free, so anyone citing it - a journalist, a student, an AI system - gets a link that never breaks and a clear credit to you. GigXchange has 12 dataset DOIs, one per monthly rates issue plus the directories and glossary.

Only the parts that are safe, and only after they are anonymised and aggregated. We publish patterns - medians, counts, ranges by area - never a customer, an address or anything that identifies a person. You approve every column before release. A database you build has legal protection in the UK under the database regulations, so the open dataset is a chosen sample, not your whole book.

Expect months, not weeks - usually 6 to 12 before it shows clearly. Links come as people find the tool and stats through search, and AI citations follow once enough sources point to you. I won't pretend otherwise: as of October 2026 GigXchange, which runs all of this, had only 2 independent sites citing it. The AI Visibility Monitor is how you watch it move.

It is a check that every number on your pages matches one master source file before anything is published. Without it, the same fact drifts - "3 days" on one page, "about a week" on another - and AI systems quoting you pick up the contradiction and trust you less. GigXchange learned this the hard way when its rates figures appeared several different ways. One number per fact, with its date, fixes it.

No - it is the opposite. Bought links break Google's spam policies and can sink a site when found. This programme gives other sites a reason to link to you of their own accord: a tool their readers use, a number they need. Nothing is paid for, nothing has to be hidden, and the material keeps working after the project ends.

An export of the data you hold - jobs, prices, timings, outcomes, whatever is relevant - plus an hour to agree the question and approve the wording. A spreadsheet is fine. We strip personal data before we do anything else, and you sign off every column of the published dataset. If your site can't host a tool, Web Development can, or we host it on Cloudflare under your domain.