Learn how to build AI citations and rank in ChatGPT and Gemini. Charlie Marchant explains how to research prompts, analyze sources, and use proactive outreach to get your brand referenced in AI answers.

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Welcome to today's Whiteboard Friday. I'm Charlie, CEO of Exposure Ninja, and I'm going to be speaking to you today about AI citation building: what it is and how we actually do it.

So, have you ever wished your website was showing up higher in ChatGPT, maybe for your own business or for one of your clients? Well, citation building can help us achieve that.

So a citation is a webpage that gets referenced in an AI-generated response. You will see citations in ChatGPT, in Gemini, in Perplexity, and in other AI platforms. Most of the time, they don't show up automatically. So, for example, in ChatGPT, there's a bottom toolbar that looks like this.

If you click the “Sources” button, it will unfurl a side panel which shows all of the articles that have been cited when the AI generated that response.

Being cited in those articles means that your website is more likely to show up and be visible in AI answers that your business actually cares about when you've got a strategy behind it. 

So why do we even want our business showing up in some of these answers in AI? This is because more and more people are actually starting their buyer journey in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other AI platforms. ChatGPT alone has around 2.5 billion searches every day. And perhaps we care a little bit about the demographics of who is actually searching in those platforms.

In ChatGPT, we see that our younger generations, 18 to 24, 25 to 34, and 35 to 44, are the most likely to actually be starting their buyer journeys inside ChatGPT. But you might be thinking people use ChatGPT for all sorts of things, not only buyer journeys.

We know already that around 49% of the searches that happen in ChatGPT are people asking questions. They might be asking comparison questions for products and services they're thinking about. Or they might be doing very top-of-funnel questions to start their buyer journey as they go. Compared to just 11% having expressive conversations and perhaps asking for personal advice, and around 40% who are using ChatGPT to actually get things done, things like writing emails or drafting structures for their blog posts.

So now that we know why we want to be cited in AI, we need to decide what we want to be cited for and figure out what those citations actually are. 

So how do we do it? The first thing we need to do is decide the prompts that we care about showing up for in ChatGPT or other AI platforms. 

Step 1: Decide which prompts you care about

You can start this the same way you would start keyword research in SEO. It gives you a good idea of initial search volumes that are used on Google searches. From there, you can do research with your customers. That might be calling your customers up or emailing them to understand the kinds of questions that they ask. Speaking to your own sales and marketing team to understand the language that your customers often use, or even looking on Reddit, Quora, and other forums. You can then format the keywords that you've researched into natural language to think about the prompts you most care about showing up for in ChatGPT and AI answers. 

Step 2: Analyze the citations for each prompt

Once you've got a short list of prompts, let's say you've got up to 20 prompts that you're working with to begin with, you can then input those manually into ChatGPT or the AI platforms that you want to show up for and start analyzing the citations that get given in those responses.

Most of the time, there's going to be quite a few citations. So I would recommend creating a full list of citations in a spreadsheet, with the URLs marked. And then you can start to see the frequency of certain topics and of certain publications.

Step 3: Perform outreach for inclusion in those cited publications

Then, once you've got those, you can outreach to the journalists, to the editors who wrote those articles, to try and get your business mentioned within the article as well.

And what's most important here is not getting a link in the article, the way that we think of link building for traditional Google SEO. It's actually just having your brand mentioned in the context that you care about, that feels like the way you want your business or your client's business to be understood by AI.

So don't worry too much about the link. Think much more about the mention and the context.

But this is kind of a reverse engineering strategy at the moment. We're actually seeing what's already been cited and then trying to gain mentions in those citations. We can do this the other way around. 

BONUS: Do proactive outreach to gain additional mentions

So the bonus example is thinking about proactive outreach. Once you've got your whole list of topics and citations, you can get an idea of the websites that get cited really frequently. You might start to see the same domains coming up and the topics that come up frequently as well.

For example, if you're a business that actually sells CRMs to other small businesses, you might be searching for topics like the best CRMs for small businesses or the best CRMs for small sales teams.

In those types of citations, you might see a lot of "best of " articles. That gives you a way to proactively decide what you actually want to outreach for, and that might be trying to get links in those articles in the short term. But next year, you might be thinking about publishing 2026 articles or 2027 articles on similar "best of" topics, knowing they're quite likely to be referenced by AI.

One of the brilliant things about the proactive outreach is that AI loves to cite fresh content. So anything that gets published more recently has more potential to be cited, especially if you know it's the kind of website that AI often cites from your original reverse engineering strategy.

If you have any more questions about AI citation building and how it works, then I'm Charlie Marchant from Exposure Ninja. You can find me on LinkedIn anytime, and I'm more than happy to have a chat. Have a fantastic rest of your Friday.