Citely was founded May 2026 by Thomas Johnson, a developer-founder who previously built DealerOS (an automotive AI platform with 324,000+ lines of code and five filed USPTO provisional patents). Thomas is the sole operator: there is no agency layer, no account manager, no offshore subcontractor — engagement work is performed directly by the platform architect.
Citely was built by Thomas Johnson — a developer-founder shipping agentic AI products in production. Most generative engine optimization providers are SEO consultants who pivoted in the last twelve months. They rent monitoring tools from third parties and mark up the cost to you. Citely is built end-to-end in-house: the API integrations, the audit engine, the dashboard, the optimization workflow — all engineered myself.
Citely is a managed service, not a software subscription. The dashboard is proof of work, not the product. Our pricing sits in the agency category at agency- competitive rates — the difference is that we built our own monitoring stack, so there's no third-party software markup and the quality is consistent rather than agency-variable.
We're currently running Citely on our own product, DealerOS, as the live case study. You can watch the citation index lift in real time on the demo page. The methodology is the same one we'd apply to your firm — eating our own dog food in public.
I work directly with every client. There's no account manager, no junior team, no offshore subcontractor. If you order an audit or a setup engagement, the work is done by the person who built the platform.