Step 2: Analyze the quotes for each prompt
Once you have a short list of suggestions, let’s say you have up to 20 suggestions that you’re working with to start with, you can then manually enter them into ChatGPT or the AI platforms you want to show up in and start analyzing the quotes that are given in those answers.
Most of the time there will be several quotes. So I would recommend creating a comprehensive list of citations in a spreadsheet, with the URLs marked. And then we begin to see the frequency of certain topics and certain publications.
Step 3: Carry out awareness-raising activities for inclusion in cited publications
So, once you have these, you can contact the journalists, the editors who wrote those articles, to try to get your business mentioned in the article too.
And the most important thing here is not to get a link in the article, the way we think about link building for traditional Google SEO. It’s really just the fact that your brand is mentioned in the context that you’re interested in, which seems like the way you want your business or your customer’s business to be understood by the AI.
So don’t worry too much about the connection. Think a lot more about mention and context.
But at the moment this is a kind of reverse engineering strategy. We’re actually seeing what’s already been cited and then trying to get mentions in those citations. We can do it the other way around.
BONUS: Do proactive outreach to get additional mentions
So the bonus example is to think about proactive outreach. Once you have the entire list of topics and citations, you can get an idea of the websites that are cited very frequently. You may start to see the same domains coming in and even topics popping up frequently.
For example, if you’re a company that actually sells CRMs to other small businesses, you might search for topics like the best CRMs for small businesses or the best CRMs for small sales teams.
In this type of citations, you may see many “best of” articles. This gives you the ability to proactively decide what you actually want to achieve your goals for and that could be trying to get links in those short term articles. But next year, you might think about publishing 2026 or 2027 articles on similar “best of” topics, knowing that they are very likely to be referenced by AI.
One of the brilliant things about proactive outreach is that AI loves to mention new content. So anything that is published more recently has more potential to be cited, especially if you know it’s the type of website that the AI often cites from your original reverse engineering strategy.
If you have more questions about AI citation creation and how it works, then I’m Charlie Marchant from Exposure Ninja. You can find me on LinkedIn at any time and I’m more than happy to have a chat. Have a great rest of your Friday.
Originally published in February 2026, this Whiteboard Friday is packed with insights that are equally relevant today.
