AI "Cited" You. That's Not the Same as AI "Recommending" You.

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0:01Last week, I showed you a page that Google hasn't even indexed that AI sites across seven pages. And that left the obvious question here, right? If they're citing us, we've won, right? Not really. This week I want to dive into why cited is not the same as recommended. So, here it is. An AI citation, and we're going to check out these images, uses your content as the source, typically without naming, maybe shoving you into the sources side panel, like these on display.

0:51Now, you might still get, like you can see here, I'll blow these up, your name or your client's name, but what we're really going for is the recommendation. See how our client is listed above Capterra and TrustRadius? Same here. These are okay. What we really want though is the recommendation up top, seeing them over G2 or Capterra. So, I think then the next obvious question is, how to get that? If you get that, what you're looking for, like I already wrote about last week, is the increase in branded search. So, an increase in your brand name, an increase in the impressions of your brand name. That's what we're looking for in Google Search Console as correlation, not necessarily one-to-one causation, but correlation.

1:43And citation doesn't automatically become a recommendation. So, this was tough for me. Muskaan had to walk me through this. She said it really comes down to the prompt. You know, the idea here is that our customer, in their customer journey, in the discovery phase is comparing A, B, and C and that's going to surface our brand as a recommended solution. However, if they are not looking to buy, they're not looking to discover a brand and they're still not aware that solutions exist or maybe not even problem aware yet, they're more asking about what is this even? They're looking for information and that's where you're going to just get a citation.

2:33So, just to illustrate most brands who are new to AI search, they may have a little bit or AI may not even know they exist. Next up you may have great informational content targeting the SERPs of yesterday and they will cite that, not necessarily name you. We consider this the trap. And finally, at the highest tier of success, we want to see our clients recommended, right right up there at the top. So, the question is how do we get there? First of all, remember don't bash your head against the wall trying to do it on informational prompts. These are in response to buying prompts at the bottom of the funnel.

3:16And you need to have AI know that you are credible and the way you do that, at least for us, is pairing offsite with onsite. So, you can make the claim, but you also need others, whether it's independent media publishers that mention your brand name or Reddit or LinkedIn or YouTube, you need these other offsite to complement what you say about yourself onsite and you do need both. You need the onsite as well.

4:01For us and this This really drove it home for me, you know, I've been with Miss Cotton and Shinjin for a 4-hour workshop and I still needed last week's meeting for her to really hit me over the head with it that recommendations matter more to buyers right now than the Google SERPs and navigating to an independent publisher themselves. These are These are the most credible real estate right now. I I myself have switched my searching behavior to read the AI overviews or Google's AI mode uh in a lot of cases Claude to help me out. I know other people use chat. So, the takeaway really is if someone says, "Yeah, we're showing up in ChatGPT." Your first question is, "Are we cited or are we recommended?" And then secondly, if it's just cited, you know, not everything's falling apart on you yet.

4:43It might be that you're just looking at an informational prompt. So, look for your bottom-of-funnel target prompt. Make sure we're asking in ChatGPT and Google's AI mode and monitoring whether we're absent, cited, or recommended. So, that's this week's newsletter and hope to catch you next week. Thanks for watching.