How to Get Cited by AI (Not Just Found)

Everyone is optimizing the exact same way, and it shows

Have you noticed everyone sounds the same online lately?

Scroll my LinkedIn feed for two minutes. Same advice. Same posts. Even the same tidy little structure on every one of them.

Here's what I think is happening. We stopped using AI to sharpen our own thinking and started letting it think for us.

And it graciously hands us all back the same answers. No new ideas. Nothing that stands out.

AI is a tool. A really good one. But it's only as original as what you give it. Feed it what everyone else feeds it, and you get what everyone else gets.

So I went looking for the spots where you can still stand out. The places where you can hand AI better material to work with, so it actually points people to you. I found two.

The cheap win: turn your lists into tables

I went and looked at what the AI tools say they actually want. Not opinions. Their own answers.

Ask ChatGPT how to optimize content and it tells you to use bullet points, numbered lists, and tables. Ask how Perplexity picks its sources and clarity is one of its rules. It wants well-structured content that's easier to extract.

Read that again. Easier to extract.

That's the game. AI isn't reading your article like a human curled up with coffee. It's scanning for the cleanest, densest answer it can lift and cite. A wall of text makes it work for it. A table hands it the answer on a plate.

So take the listicle you already have, the "12 ways to do X," and rebuild it as a table. Same knowledge, a third of the words, ten times more liftable.

Here's the difference, one after the other. Very few people are building tables because of the extra effort. This is where you can get ahead.

Your moat: content AI can't find anywhere else

Now the one that actually matters.

I dug into which sites ChatGPT pulls from for my topics. I expected the big names. Instead I got a list of tiny blogs I'd never heard of. No authority. No big backlink profile. They just had the clearest answer to a specific question, so they got the citation.

That told me something. Right now, being big isn't the gate. Being the source is.

And here's the part everyone misses. AI can only cite what already exists. It'll summarize public knowledge all day long. What it can't do is invent the voice of the person who actually built the thing. It can't write "here's the mistake we made in year two that changed how we do this." That sentence has never been typed anywhere. It only lives in the founder's head.

So go get it out of their head.

Sit a founder down and record them, and you've got content that's one of a kind by definition. Their story. The decision nobody else was in the room for. AI has no other source for it. So when the topic comes up, you're not competing for the citation. You are the citation.

What this looks like in practice

Here's an example of me talking about AI vsibility and AI's impact on marketing. I was talking about how people don't trust your pitch anymore. I feel that people are seeking permission from AI to decide whether to trust something. And I say this from the point of view that I even ask AI for validation before making decisions.

Pick one topic your customers actually ask about. Then do both moves on it.

Build the reference table that out-structures every competitor. Then wrap it in the real story from the person who runs the business, in their own words. Now you've got the most extractable and the most original page on the internet for that question.

That's a page AI wants to read and has no choice but to cite.

The short version

Getting found by AI is easy. Everyone's doing it. Getting chosen is the hard part, and it comes down to two things almost nobody bothers with. Structure your knowledge so AI can lift it. And say something only you can say.

Do the boring checklist, sure. Then go do the part your competitors won't.

That's the part I love. Sitting a founder down on camera, pulling the real story out of their head, and turning it into something nobody can copy. If you've been doing great work while the wrong people get famous, that's where I come in. You shouldn't be the best-kept secret in your industry. Want the deeper playbook first? Start withhow to get recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools.

Let's go!

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