AEO citations need to echo reality
The problem is not where to place their citations but in what the content says about you.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Foundation Marketing and Omnia
dofollow.com helps leading SaaS brands win visibility across Google and AI search. Every day you wait is another day competitors build authority. Book a call
Paid subscribers can use this HTML audit template to track how your brand is perceived online
Recently, a company showed me the agency scope they were working on to build citations for AEO and asked me my opinion on whether it would work. A citation is any piece of content out in the world that an LLM reads and treats as evidence about a brand. The scope as they had it set was, at least in my view, a huge waste of money. It wasn’t going to lead to a penalty because the bar for an LLM penalty is likely extremely high, if one exists, but it also wasn't going to achieve what they expected.
This particular company had been spending a significant budget on accruing citations, and to date, none of their work had changed how LLMs described their business and products. The problem was not where they placed their citations but in what the content they cited said about them.
[Sponsored by Omnia]
Why are you just measuring AI visibility when you can improve it?!
Most AI monitoring tools stop at data. Omnia is an agentic AEO platform that turns that data into a prioritized action list, then helps you execute it: which gaps to close, what content to create, where to place it, across every major AI engine.
It’s the action layer most tools leave out. Let Omnia’s agent do the work, or connect it to Claude or ChatGPT via the MCP.
Built for lean marketing teams that want measurable movement in AI search but can’t afford to hire a GEO expert.
They had written content that described a version of the brand that didn’t quite exist. Without giving away too many details, this is a business that is NOT widely loved by their customer base. Their customers used their products because it sort of suited their needs, but they weren’t truly happy. In a sense, their citations claiming that the amazing features of their products were loved by all were not a reality; they were just aspirational. The models ignored their citations because the organic training material and citations about their brand said otherwise. The LLMs weren’t wrong to ignore their planted citations in favor of what already existed on the web.
SEO thinking doesn’t work for AEO
This is a mistake I see constantly in AEO work right now, and it comes from people carrying over a bad habit from the SEO era. In traditional SEO, you could describe your product as more than it was, and it worked just fine because a page ranking for a keyword didn’t have to withstand any scrutiny from an AI model with a reality filter.
LLMs think. They don’t just take what is on your page at face value and then rank you for that keyword or prompt because you said it. If you aren’t the best pizza shop, plumber, or SaaS company, you aren’t going to be recommended as the best just because your title tag said “best” and on-page keywords say you are the best.
LLMs form an understanding of a brand from the accumulated weight of everything written about you across the web, and no single piece of citation content, even if it's somehow placed on the most authoritative site, is going to override that accumulated weight if it contradicts it. Ten articles painting a brand as the best option in a category won't matter if a hundred independent reviews say otherwise. The model counts votes, and the planted ones are a small minority.
It’s important to be blunt about what this means because many consultants and AEO tools are selling something close to the opposite. The value of citation efforts is not to construct a new reality about your brand and manipulate the model toward believing it. LLMs that process millions of signals, both about what they read on the web combined with what they think the user is asking, aren’t going to suddenly change their opinions because a handful of Reddit threads say something different.
Extend the brand with citations
Successful citation work is about informing the models about what you do well if they aren’t already aware of it. The role of a citation is not to create a new reality. If you are not perceived as doing well at the thing you claim, you need to fix it before you claim it.
From this standpoint, AEO is very unlike SEO. While I believe great SEO lives in creating a product for the search user, product-led SEO, SEO can still live in a vacuum without strong collaboration with the people that built the product. An external SEO agency can be successful without any access to product teams and existing search data. An agency or internal team can manipulate search signals to achieve a traffic goal even when the product doesn’t deserve it. AEO is as cross-functional as it gets.
AEO efforts need to involve product teams to ensure the product is presented the way the company wants it to be in LLMs. AEO relies heavily on its brand marketing teams to create a brand perception that aligns with what the company wants to be. AEO is not just a marketing function. AEO is most definitely not SEO 2.0.
AEO is not performance marketing
AEO is not persuasion through marketing in the traditional sense. You’re not trying to convince a skeptical human to buy something through creative framing. You’re trying to make sure a system that’s already going to form an opinion about you, using thousands of sources you don’t control, has the clearest possible view of the sources you do control. This is why, unlike traditional SEO, which might not even require a website, AEO requires you to own your sources.
Whatever your sources are, owned or organic, the LLMs will only recommend you if they are true. As LLMs get smarter, they will also get better at cross-referencing at scale. So, deep diving into one particular citation source, whether it's media, social media, or a partnership effort, is doomed to fail if the citations don’t reflect reality.
Yes, there are things that work right now for manipulating citations, but unlike traditional SEO, where known spam can outlast Google updates for years, this will not be the case in the long term in AEO. Change in an AI world is fast. Loopholes will close in months, not years.
Now is the time for action
The brands that will still be well represented in AI answers three years from now are the ones that used this period of AI confusion to ensure the model’s understanding matches the actual value they deliver.
So before you spin up a citation effort, the guiding question isn’t “what do we want the model to say about us.” It’s “what does the Internet already say about us, and where is the gap between that and what we wish they said?”
(Use the audit template linked above)
When the gap is due to good work not being well documented, citations will help close that awareness gap. When the gap is that the underlying product or service doesn’t yet match the story you want told, citations that are just marketing won’t have the effect you want. No amount of structured content, entity markup, or third-party outreach will be more effective than actually building the thing you’re claiming to have already built.
Fix your product, not your marketing.
[Sponsored by Foundation Marketing]
94% of B2B buyers now use AI when researching software. So who’s AI citing when they look for tools like yours?
Well, it’s usually not you. We analyzed 57 million citations across 50 brands: only 2.2% of citations on early-stage buyer queries pointed to brand-owned domains.
Your SEO, PR, and social don’t fix this on their own. And we’ve learnt over the last 12 months that getting cited by AI is its own discipline. The Hidden Selection Phase report shows where AI pulls its answers from, and what separates the brands it cites from the ones it skips.
Download the report
Getting itchy and instead want to see where your brand stands? Book a call for a free content audit with the leading AI visibility agency for B2B.