AI citation building

AI citation building: the sources AI tools read

Earning the mentions AI tools actually pull from, so your business gets named when someone asks for a recommendation.

What this is

When an assistant recommends local businesses it is not reading everybody's website. It draws on a relatively small set of sources it treats as reliable: established directories, review platforms, local publications, industry bodies and community sites.

If you are absent from those, you are absent from the answer, however good your own site is.

What you get

What this targets

  • 01

    Working out what gets cited now

    Asking the assistants questions a customer would ask and noting which sources they name. The list is often narrower than expected and it differs by industry.

  • 02

    Established review platforms

    The ones that carry weight in your trade. Being present with genuine reviews is worth more than being present on twenty places nobody references.

  • 03

    Local publications and community sites

    Where they exist and where there is a real reason to appear. Coverage earned because something happened, rather than a listing bought.

  • 04

    Industry and trade bodies

    Association listings and accreditation registers, which these systems tend to treat as authoritative because they are checkable.

  • 05

    Consistency across all of it

    Your business described the same way everywhere. A system assembling an answer from several sources handles agreement better than contradiction.

What it costs

Quoted after a free consult, because what it takes depends entirely on what you already have. Book a call, I will tell you what is involved, and you get a number before anything starts. Website plan details are on the pricing page.

How this differs

Ordinary citation building targets directories that feed Google's local index. This targets the sources large language models were trained on and retrieve from, which is a different and considerably shorter list.

There is real overlap: some sources count for both. The difference is which list you prioritise and how you choose, and where the two diverge this one follows what the assistants actually cite.

AI Overview optimization is the on-site half, making your own pages quotable. This is the off-site half.

This is newer than the rest of the work on this site and the ground moves. I will tell you what is observable today rather than present it as a settled discipline, because it is not one yet.

Questions

What people ask

How do you know which sources AI tools use?

By asking them and reading the citations they give. Several assistants show their sources directly, which makes this observable rather than theoretical.

Is this different from what you would do for Google?

Partly. Both reward being mentioned on credible third-party sites. The lists differ, and AI tools lean more heavily on a small number of established sources than Google does.

Can you guarantee I will be recommended?

No, and nobody can. These systems do not have a ranking you can buy into or a submission process. What can be done is making you the kind of business that is easy to find, verify and name.

How long does this take?

Slow. These systems update their view of the world over months. If you need something this quarter, this is not it.

Get named when someone asks

Tell me what is going on and I will tell you whether this is what you actually need. No pitch deck and no pressure.

Book a free consult