AI citations
How assistants choose which tool to name, which sources they pull from when your buyers ask, and what actually moves a citation once it is measured.
Short answer
What does AI citations cover?
How assistants choose which tool to name, which sources they pull from when your buyers ask, and what actually moves a citation once it is measured.
Who gets named, and why it moves
When a buyer asks an assistant which tool to use, the answer is assembled out of pages, and most of them are not yours. In our own measurement of 901 citations across 60 answers, 91.5 percent pointed off site, spread over 82 distinct hosts.
The set is also unstable. Ahrefs, measuring across 43,000 keywords, found 45.5 percent of citations change between consecutive observations while the answer itself stays about 95 percent semantically identical. The wording holds steady and the sources underneath it churn.
What that means for the work
Two things follow. Being cited is a property of pages you have to earn a place on rather than pages you can publish your way onto, which is why so much of this category is about other people's surfaces. And citation churn makes a before and after comparison unreliable on its own, because a source list that reshuffles this often will show movement whether or not anyone did anything.
The posts here cover both halves: what the evidence actually supports about how assistants pick sources, where that evidence is thinner than the confident version of it sounds, and what has to be true of a measurement before a change in citations can be credited to the work rather than to the churn.
AI Overview Optimization: What Actually Changes
Google ranks first for "AI Overview optimization" and says no special optimization exists. What the docs state, what the studies measured, what nobody tested.
42 min
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, and Which Crawler Actually Decides Whether ChatGPT Can Cite You
OpenAI runs four crawlers and only one of them decides whether ChatGPT search can cite you. Which one it is, and why the popular warning runs backwards.
46 min
Schema Markup for AI Search: How to Isolate the Variable (2026)
Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages adding schema and citations barely moved. Here is how to isolate structured data as a variable, and what a null result looks like.
80 min
Does llms.txt actually move AI citations, and how would you tell
Every page ranking for this term explains what llms.txt is. None answers whether it changes anything. What 40 sites deploy, and the test that would tell.
43 min
LLM SEO, what it actually is and what the work looks like
Google says its AI features run on the same ranking systems as Search, so the tactics are familiar. What changed is how you tell whether the work landed.
46 min
Best AI SEO Agency for Developer Tools and API Companies
A five-question checklist for vetting an AI SEO agency, built from what real developer-tool buyers report going wrong, not a ranked vendor list.
24 min
Does Google index Reddit comments? What actually counts
Reddit's robots.txt disallows every crawler, yet Google shows Reddit with full descriptions. Here is what is actually indexed, measured rather than assumed.
25 min
AI Citation Decay, Half-Life, and When a Drop Is Real
A competitor platform now tracks how long an AI citation survives. We checked the idea against our own volatility data. A single drop is not proof of decay.
23 min
What Predicts an AI Citation Is Not What Proves Yours
DiscoveredLabs measured 2 million AI citations and found what correlates with getting cited. Correlation across pages you don't own isn't proof for yours.
22 min
AI Visibility Tools Show a Score, Not Whether It Was You
Ten guides rank the best AI visibility trackers. None of them tells you whether the score moving was your AEO spend or the model changing its mind on its own.
23 min
Reddit is cited by AI. That is not a reason to buy upvotes.
Published Reddit citation shares run from 2% to 46.7%, and one study puts Reddit at 67.8% of every URL ChatGPT retrieves and then declines to cite.
23 min
Reddit Blocks 23M Spam Views a Day. A Citation Signal.
Reddit published its spam enforcement numbers for users and moderators. Read from the AI-citation side, it is an argument about which sources deserve quoting.
26 min
What Is Answer Engine Optimization? How AI Picks Sources
What answer engine optimization means, how AI assistants decide what to cite, and what our own measurement work says about proving it caused a citation gain.
23 min