Marketing After SEO: Competing for AI Citations

In May of 2023, during its annual I/O Conference, Google quietly introduced a feature that would change search forever — “AI Overviews.” The idea was to use generative AI to summarize information from websites and provide users with instantaneous search result summaries, ranging from finding local services to quick how-to answers.

As AI overviews become the norm, they have quietly rewritten the rules of visibility. Websites that were once ranking at or near the top suddenly lost visibility and authority due to a lack of Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). Marketing efforts have shifted from focusing on how to rank high to ensuring AI systems can cite your website without requiring users to click through.

The familiar logic of SEO (high SERP equals traffic and leads) has cracked. Securing presence in Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or any other AI system is now the real goal. Without mentions in these systems, a brand risks being completely lost in the mix. When an AI overview appears, CTR for what was an organic result can fall from around 25% to as low as 7%, as reported by BrightEdge. Pew Research shows that one in five U.S. adults uses AI assistants for searches, with over 30% of Gen Z relying on such snippets.

International projects aiming to impact North American or MENA markets must adapt to such AI-driven search trends or risk losing visibility. These users might never use Google again to search for the “best PR agencies in Poland” or “top B2B marketing firms in Central Europe.” They rely on machine-generated answers: if your brand isn’t mentioned, it isn’t considered.

AI Favors the Brands It Already ‘Knows’

A recent example of how GEO and AI-generated answers impact the industry can be seen in the case of the cloud-based CRM platform Salesforce. When the team asked AI, “What are the leading CRM platforms?” Salesforce appeared at the top. That type of recognition didn’t happen overnight. AI generates such answers because of Salesforce’s efforts in maintaining a strong Wikipedia presence, publishing analyst reports and case studies, and securing media coverage. AI recognizes the comprehensive digital footprint and bases its responses on the structure that Salesforce “seeded” into the environment before LLM became a household term.

HOKA, the California running shoe brand, is another example. It built a strategy around expert reviews, athlete endorsements, and sports media coverage, including YouTube. When users ask Perplexity or Google AI, “What is the best long-distance running shoe brand?” HOKA is often listed next to industry leaders like Nike and Adidas.

Cases like these demonstrate how generative search not only rewards scale but also favors brands with an expansive online presence across trusted sources. Traditional SEO is no longer enough to get a page to the top. Even if you are number one, you may not be cited in AI results. To remain visible to prospects, marketing firms must adopt an “AI visibility” strategy.

GEO has turned the game into one of brand awareness and AI citations. The hard truth is that if 25% of the AI responses related to your niche or industry include your competitors and not you, you’re missing out.

How AI Systems Source Their Information

Authority and structure shape how visible your brand will be in the age of generative AI. Take ChatGPT: the system acts more like a selective librarian than a search engine. Profound’s recent analysis of over 30 million citations from August 2024 to June 2025 found that Wikipedia dominated the top ten most-cited sources. Closely followed were Reddit, Forbes, G2, TechRadar, and other high-authority platforms like Reuters. Listings relying on branded blogs or product pages rarely appeared. ChatGPT relies on high-trust sources with journalistic authority or encyclopedic content.

Google’s AI overviews are a bit more varied in source reliability. Research from BrightEdge lists YouTube as the primary cited domain, followed by blogs, news sources, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Medium. The goal of such variance was to create a more balanced result for users where community input is on the same playing field as high authority sources.

With Perplexity, the results are as diverse as the AI platform’s name. Profound’s research shows that almost half of the results were sourced from Reddit, followed by YouTube and then industry platforms like PCMag, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and G2. Here, community input and user-generated reviews are just as crucial as high authority citations, resulting in a prevalence of ranked reviews, comparison articles, and ‘best of’ lists.

Anthropic’s AI, Claude, is much closer to ChatGPT in its generative summaries, often focusing on high-authority news, reports, and neutral snippets. The result is a more restrained system focusing less on community input and more on a well-documented and professional context.

How AI ‘Reads’ Content (and Decides What to Quote)

To get quoted on any of the four AI platforms, marketers have to recognize patterns. These systems are not “reading” information in the same way we do. They are extracting facts based on authority and reputation. 

Consider a structured list like “Top Ten Pickleball Rackets of 2025” or “Best Baby Carriers for Hiking.” These articles provide the kind of comparable snippets AI models tend to reuse. Whenever a brand is included in structured articles, especially on high-authority domains, it increases the likelihood of appearing in citations.

Q&A-style pages or articles also work. Interviews, comparison pieces, and long FAQ lists are quickly lifted because their format mirrors the natural «conversational style» questions users type into search engines. The AI models see this content as an extension of natural search. However, the information must be fresh. Certain AI models, such as Google’s AI overview, tend to favour articles that have been recently updated over those from static, older pages. AI overviews become even stronger when they can include recent news stories from authoritative sources.

Smart Citation Strategies for AI Visibility

If your brand aims to enhance its marketing strategy in the era of GEO and AI summaries, it must adapt to these changes. Start by allowing AI crawlers in robots.txt files. That will ensure models like ClaudeBot or GPTBot can parse and index your website. Otherwise, your brand won’t get mentioned at all — no matter how strong your online presence is.

Once the robots.txt file is fixed, you need to “blind audit” your online presence. Ask an AI platform the same types of natural questions that should list your brand as an answer. Make a list of who gets mentioned over you or how you’re described. The tone of these answers matters because they create contextual information. You can perform these audits manually once per week or engage an automated tracking system like the BrightEdge AIO, Semrush AIO, Profound, and Promptmonitor.

After your audit, you need to look at where your content is published. LLM-seeding is essential — your own website alone is not enough. You need to place content on Medium, LinkedIn, and Substack. Find a way to get listed on G2 or Capterra. Solicit reviews for TripAdvisor and Yelp. Consider starting a YouTube channel or joining relevant subreddits to increase your mentions. If possible, secure a presence on Wikipedia. Together, these signals help AI models recognize your brand as an authority in its niche.

Finally, optimize all your content for greater AI readability and parsing. Include strong structural elements with simplified HTML. Incorporate FAQs into your pages and articles or utilize comparative matrices and tables. Do everything you can to make facts easier to find for machines and not just users.

Even with all these changes, you cannot entirely eliminate SEO elements. Authoritative backlinks, media coverage, image alt-tags, and H1 headers remain a solid foundation.

Measuring Your Share of the AI Citation Economy

Marketing must evolve to keep pace with changing AI summaries, snippets, and responses. You need to measure your “Share of AI” as a core goal. When your competitors hold a larger share of AI answers within your niche, it reveals a measurable gap you need to close. Put another way, being the first brand listed in Perplexity or Claude carries more weight than the tenth. Your AI Visibility Score weighs how often you get mentioned, in what position, and from what authoritative sources.

As you adapt, don’t overlook the power of quality and sentiment. Backlinks from low-quality blogs don’t carry nearly the same weight as citations in Wikipedia or the Financial Times. You can translate these ‘Share of AI’ goals into real KPIs, such as achieving 20+ mentions in prominent industry outlets or review platforms.

One emerging tactic involves AI referral traffic. AI answers with links aren’t clicked as often as organic results, but they can still drive referral spikes through other AI models. Such indirect mentions help connect your Share of AI visibility, increasing AI mentions. These indirect mentions strengthen your overall Share of AI visibility and contribute to higher citation frequency.

AI and PR Align in the Age of Generative Search

AI snippets and citations have changed how PR metrics are measured. Visibility can no longer be solely about driving traffic, but also about being mentioned as a source in generated responses. For both AI and PR, the goal of delivering credible, structured, and trustworthy information remains the same.

To keep up with demand, brands must adapt by allowing AI access, seeding LLMs, and restructuring content for machine parsing. The use of AI search in ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, Claude, and other models is growing from 20% now, to easily 30-40% in the foreseeable future. Those brands that are mentioned by default will find themselves in a strong position to grow. Those without such recognition face a challenging uphill battle. 

The pathway forward is clear. PR can no longer rely on vanity clicks. A blended strategy that emphasizes AI citations is equally (if not more) important for online visibility, authority, and consumer trust.

COMMA PR is the official SmartContentPro partner in Lithuania, helping tech companies and brands expanding into European markets.