Citation gap audit
Your link profile, mention footprint, and review standing against the competitors engines currently cite. Toxic links flagged for disavow, lost equity reclaimed, displacement targets ranked.
AI Citation Building
85% of AI mentions come from sites you don't own.
When an engine decides which brands to name, it weighs what the rest of the web says about you: editorial links, unlinked mentions, press coverage, reviews. We build that evidence layer as one system. Editorial placements earned through digital PR and direct negotiation, mentions in the sources LLMs actually retrieve from, and review signals that back it all up. No PBNs, no farms, no 'DA40 guaranteed' spreadsheet.
85% of brand mentions in AI answers come from third-party domains, not your own site
25+ high-authority editorial placements per program, negotiated below market rates
DR 25→60 the authority climb this exact playbook produced for our own agency brand
Why it matters now
Links decided who ranks.
Citations decide who gets named.
Backlinks remain among Google's strongest signals, and that lever still gets pulled hard here. But LLMs widened the game: they register your brand appearing next to category terms across credible sources, hyperlink or not, and they weigh review sentiment while they're at it. One earned placement now pays three ways: ranking equity, citation eligibility, and recommendation confidence. The catch hasn't changed since the link-farm era: most of what's sold as this service will quietly sink you.
Editorial links, still the spine
Contextual placements inside real content on publications your buyers read. Relevance over raw DA, natural velocity, disciplined anchors. Boring on purpose, because boring survives updates.
Unlinked brand mentions
An LLM doesn't need an anchor tag to register authority. Consistent mentions beside your category terms, in sources engines retrieve from, move your recommendation rate on their own.
Digital PR assets
Original data, small surveys, and expert commentary that journalists actually want. One citable asset earns press, links, and AI-retrievable mentions in a single motion.
Reviews & sentiment
G2, Clutch, Trustpilot, Google Business Profile. Engines check what customers say before recommending anyone, so review velocity runs as part of the same program, not a separate line item.
What's included
The corroboration engine, end to end.
Digital PR campaigns
Citation-worthy data assets pitched to journalists and editors: the placements that earn rankings and AI mentions in one shot.
Editorial placements & outreach
Manual, personalized outreach plus negotiated placements dealt directly with publishers. A vendor-negotiation background keeps quality placements below the going rate.
Unlinked mention campaigns
Expert commentary, podcast features, and roundup inclusions in the publications LLMs crawl. The mention layer most agencies don't even measure.
Review velocity program
Generation systems for the platforms that matter in your category, with response frameworks that protect sentiment. A review stream is a citation stream.
Recommendation-rate tracking
Monthly measurement of how often ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini name you for category prompts, tied to the placements that moved it. Full transparency: every placement logged with URL, context, and authority.
How the work runs
Earned, not bought. The sequence comes from your gap.
First
Map the citation gap
Where competitors get their authority: which domains, which mentions, which reviews. A realistic map of what you're missing and what it costs to close.
Prep
Build assets worth citing
Original numbers, expert commentary, and linkable resources qualified by what editors and engines actually pick up, not by a DA spreadsheet.
Earn
Place across every layer
PR, editorial outreach, negotiated placements, mentions, and reviews running as one motion. Velocity paced to read as earned, because it is.
Compound
Track & re-aim
Referring domains, mention growth, sentiment, and AI recommendation rate reported monthly against baseline. What moves gets doubled; what stalls gets re-diagnosed.
Client Outcome
What earned authority does for a B2B brand's category terms.
From the results library: measured performance across a full engagement window.
The searches buyers run before writing an RFQ now surface the brand in the top 3, and its name resolves at #1.
10K organic clicks in 8 months
1.41M search impressions
#1 for brand & entity searches
Read the full story“Our sales cycle starts with an engineer Googling at their desk. We now show up in that moment, before the RFQ list is written. That's changed the quality of our inbound completely.”
Straight answers
Questions we
get asked first.
No sales spin. If the honest answer is "it depends," we tell you what it depends on.
- What is AI citation building?
- It's the practice of earning your brand a presence in the third-party sources AI engines draw answers from: editorial links, unlinked press mentions, expert commentary, and review signals. Roughly 85% of brand mentions in AI answers come from domains the brand doesn't own, which makes this the largest single lever in GEO.
- How is this different from link building?
- Link building is one layer of it. Classic editorial links still anchor the program because Google still weighs them heavily. Citation building adds what LLMs read on top: unlinked mentions, PR coverage, and review sentiment, built and measured as one system instead of three disconnected retainers.
- Do unlinked brand mentions actually matter?
- For AI search, hugely. LLMs register your brand appearing next to category terms across their training and retrieval data, no hyperlink required. For Google, mentions reinforce entity authority. Either way the answer is yes, and almost nobody builds them deliberately.
- Are paid placements safe?
- Bought links from farms and PBNs are how sites get penalized, and AI engines learn from the same cesspool. Negotiated editorial placements on real publications with real readers are how competitive categories actually operate. We only do the second kind, and every placement is logged for you: URL, anchor, context, authority.
- How long until citations affect AI visibility?
- Google takes 4 to 10 weeks to fully credit new authority signals. AI recommendation rates often move faster, inside 4 to 8 weeks, because retrieval-based engines re-fetch sources continuously. The compounding shows over 3 to 6 months, which is why this runs as a program, not a sprint.
Keep exploring
Ready when you are
See the citations your competitors have that you don't.
Free citation gap audit: your link and mention footprint against the brands AI currently names, a toxic-link check, and a ranked list of realistic targets.
Get a free citation gap audit