See which links, mentions, directories, communities, and authority signals actually make brands get cited across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and AI Overviews. Every tactic comes with its first step, its proof, and who measured it.
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Compiled by Marving Moreton, Technical Product Manager. Tested on my own brand first.Each cell crosses upside with effort. Start at #1 and move down the numbers. Pick a tactic to get its first step, the proof and where it can backfire. The first cell is open.
Measure before you touch anything, fix what you control, then earn the mentions. Judge the result at six months, not six weeks: most search gains arrive after month three.
By the end: A baseline: “named in N of M runs” for each prompt.
Every system comes with three actions, the study that backs it, and an honest difficulty rating.
Ahrefs found 37.9% of URLs cited in Google AI Overviews also appeared in the first 10 search-result blocks.
Most numbers in AI search come from vendors measuring their own tools, and none are audited. Here is where they contradict each other, and what I would do in the meantime.
At equal Google visibility, sites with 100+ articles had up to 3.4× the AI citations.
Almost no relationship between a site’s page count and its AI visibility.
What to do meanwhile: Page count alone does nothing. Add a page only when it answers a buyer question no page of yours answers yet.
Reddit fell from 3.83% to 0.52% of ChatGPT search citations in the summer of 2026. The tracker calls the drop provisional.
Reddit is the most cited domain for Perplexity and for Google AI Overviews.
What to do meanwhile: Work Reddit for Perplexity, Google and the customers it sends directly. Do not count on it for ChatGPT.
87% of SearchGPT citations matched Bing’s top 20 results, against 56% for Google. About 100 questions.
Only 12% of URLs cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot rank in Google’s top 10 for the original prompt.
What to do meanwhile: Both. Assistants rewrite the prompt before they search, so the pages to win are the ones ranking for the sub-questions.
Sites at Domain Rating 30+ received 29× the AI citations of sites under 10.
Domain Rating correlates only 0.266 with ChatGPT visibility. Branded web mentions reach 0.664.
What to do meanwhile: Links work mostly as mentions on pages people read. Count the mentions, not the referring domains.