AI citation strategy

I want to talk about one of the methods we use for ranking in AI search because it's largely replacing what link building did for traditional SEO. Broadly speaking, ranking in AI search is pretty simple.

Someone goes to Google's AI mode or ChatGPT and enters a prompt or a query. The AI then does a series of searches.

In a traditional search engine, it sorts through hundreds of pages and ends up citing a handful of them. Whichever brands are recommended most often in those cited pages will almost always be the brands that are recommended in the final output.

So the entire game is just making sure your brand gets recommended in those cited pages. The best way to do this depends on the types of pages that are being cited, but the most common type of page that's cited is a blog post or an article.

Now, the easiest way to get your brand recommended in an article is just to write the article yourself, and that's why about 50% of the work we do at our agency is exactly that. As long as you're writing the kinds of articles that get cited by AI search, it's very effective...

you identify the top 100 to 1,000 articles being cited, you need a way to filter the ones that make sense to reach out to. We've created a cloud skill that figures out which ones are direct competitors or brands that are much too big to reach out to you directly, and organize the remaining articles by priority.

You then need to identify contact information for each publisher. Again, we have a cloud skill to do this.

Although, to be honest, I think ChatGPT's Codex would probably do a slightly better job. You then need to draft a personalized email to each of these publishers and that you'd love to be recommended in that specific article, and that you're willing to pay for placement.

Or include a reciprocal mention in an article on your own website. And as you probably guessed, we have a cloud skill for this.

And if cloud is hooked up to a knowledge base for your company, which it definitely should be, then it can even recommend specific articles where the reciprocal mention could be placed...

ommendations has a huge impact on whether the AI recommends your brand versus your competitors. And unlike traditional link building, you're only reaching out to pages that Google or ChatGPT has already told you it trusts.

So they tend to be very high quality placements.