How Can Smaller Sites Get Cited in ChatGPT?

📬 You like this podcast? You’ll love the newsletter.
Join the weekly 3-2-1 on AI search + marketing: Subscribe

How did a small blog get cited in ChatGPT ahead of major SEO platforms? By prioritizing clarity, structure, and intent alignment—not backlinks or domain authority.

In this episode of Found in AI, Cassie walks through a real-world case study where her blog, cassieclarkmarketing.com, was cited in ChatGPT ahead of established SEO brands like Semrush. The episode breaks down exactly what was tested, why it worked, and what this signals about how AI search systems choose sources.

Rather than focusing on traditional ranking factors, the conversation explains how AI engines evaluate content for reuse—and why smaller teams have a significant opportunity to earn visibility in AI-generated answers.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How content can earn AI citations without massive domain authority
• Why clarity, context, and authenticity matter more than backlinks in AI search
• The difference between SEO optimization and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
• How to structure content for both humans and AI systems
• Why smaller teams are well-positioned in the AI visibility race
• What this case study reveals about how AI search is evolving

If you’re trying to understand how to get your brand cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews, this episode breaks down what’s actually working right now—based on real results.

💬 Let’s connect:
LinkedIn → Cassie Clark | Content Strategist
Website → cassieclarkmarketing.com

Keywords: AI Citations, ChatGPT Mentions, Generative Engine Optimization, GEO, AI Search, Answer Engine Optimization, AEO, AI Visibility, Content Strategy, AI Content Marketing, AI Search Optimization, ChatGPT SEO, Perplexity Search, Schema Markup, Topical Authority, AI-Driven Content, B2B Marketing, Digital Visibility, SEO vs AEO, AI Overviews, Generative Search

Find the transcript here. 

Transcript

0:16

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome back to Found in AI, the show about getting your brand found in AI search. I'm your host Cassie Clark, CMO of Scheme and Fractional Content Strategist. If you've been following along, you know we've been running many experiments every week, just testing out tiny little tweaks and new little strategies to help our brands earn those coveted AI citations. Well today, dear listeners, I am bringing the receipts. I got cited in chat dbt. My blog on my website, cassieclarkmarketing.com, got mentioned in an AI answer ahead of freaking Simrush. So this episode, I'm breaking down exactly how that happened, what I tested, and what it means for every marketer who's trying to figure out how to rank in AI search, especially as we start planning out those Q1 strategies for 2026. Everyone wants to know how to rank in AI search right now. Heck, I even started this podcast to help cut through all the noise and all the LinkedIn junk. Looking at you, LinkedIn bros, to try to actually figure out what's working and what's not when it comes to AI engines like chat dbt, perplexity, and how to get those mentions. So for the past few months, I've been experimenting with GEO, we're calling that generative engine optimization, on my own website, cassieclarkmarketing.com. Now I will be the first to tell you, I have not been posting every week. Life has been kicking me in the back of the teeth. On top of that, I had more client deadlines and they all kind of ran together. It happens. It happens sometimes. It's fine. But when I have posted, I have been very intentional. I focused on building authority to satisfy EEAT, Google's thing, making every post easy to scan, and structuring my writing so that both people and those AI models can parse it quickly. So basically, no keyword stuffing. I'm writing for people, not the bots. But recently, something wild showed up in my jetpack stats. Traffic from my bestie, chat dbt. Now, unless I have it set up wrong, or I just have it paid for the entire subscription, jetpack isn't telling me, like, it'll tell me where the traffic source comes from, but it doesn't tell me, like, where it's going. So I don't know which post, if I'm just looking at it, I don't know which post is getting the clicks. But a little detective work pointed me to a specific post I wrote back in July. That post is called thought leadership examples. What startups get wrong and how to get it right. And my friends, that is the post chat dbt started citing. Now, let me be super clear here. This was not a formal SEO experiment. It's more like what happens when you're a little bit consistent and really curious as to what works. I wanted to see whether structuring content for clarity, not so much for complexity, could help me rank in AI search engines. Here's what I focused on. Scannability, number one. So I was using short paragraphs, clear headers, and natural subtopics. I know that's content marketing 101, but that's what we focused on. Contextual linking was the second. So I referenced real experts on LinkedIn instead of faceless corporate blogs. I got their commentary. This particular post was just, like, here's an example and here's our LinkedIn page. But we'll get into more of, like, expert stuff a little bit later. And authority signals. Like, I want a clean sourcing and original commentary from me talking about, hey, here's why this matters. And then finally, the fourth thing I focused on was freshness. Like, updating older posts with new examples and updating the published date. So in other words, what I focused on, write like a human, but format it for an algorithm so the algorithm can read it. Okay, when I saw ChatGPT show up as a traffic source, I had to know which post it was. I just had to. I am hecka nosy, sure. But also, this felt like a really big deal, considering we've been running weekly experiments for this podcast. GEO is still very much the wild west. And if I'm honest, I really like being at the forefront of it and learning as everything changes. And everything changes at least once a week. So here's what I did to find that citation. I opened ChatGPT in incognito mode, signed out, absolutely signed out, tested a few different prompts related to that blog topic. And the one that did it, the prompt was, I need to see a blog post on thought leadership examples. ChatGPT's answer cited my July article above SEMrush and other major publishers. Now, listen, seeing my own blog surface next to some of the biggest SEO names out there was super excited. Like, if you can imagine my excitement, think about that scene from Seinfeld. I've been on a Seinfeld kick lately. But you know the scene where they're jumping up and down at the door, and they're so excited, and Elaine's like doing that little happy dance. That was me. That was absolutely me. But if you're going to try to find your own citations, here's a quick little tip. Always, always, always test in incognito and signed out of ChatGPT. That's going to give you a clear slate and a truer look at what others might actually see from the same prompt. In incognito and signed out, hopefully the algorithm hasn't already learned your behavior. So the biggest question for all of this is, why does this even matter? Why am I so excited about showing up in ChatGPT for thought leadership blog posts that was just a random kind of like off-the-cuff blog post that I posted back in July? Well, I'm so glad that you asked me, because every marketer right now is asking, how do I get my brand to show up in an AI search or get cited in ChatGPT or VipaPlexity? And because content strategies like marketers are working on mapping out their strategies for Q1 of 2026, now is the time to be asking this question and trying to understand how it works. The good news with all of this, it is entirely possible to get your brand cited in these AI answers, even if you don't have a massive domain authority or backlinks or technical SEO magic. The thought leadership post I'm talking about, it doesn't have a backlink and my website's domain authority is super tiny at the moment, like super tiny. So here's what worked for me to win those AI citations or what I'm thinking worked. First thing, I structured that post around context, not necessarily keywords. That meant like including direct questions, like people would be prompting AI to answer right into my blog post. So if you read a blog post on my blog right now, you're probably going to see a line that says something like, many marketers are asking and then it's an actual question. That's like the easiest way like I have found so far to naturally add those questions into my content. You could also do the FAQ section at the end. The second thing is citing credible people, not faceless brands. So like talking with people in your network to get their insights if you're trying to do this, link to their personal LinkedIn page, and if there's someone in your network or there's not someone in your network and you're looking for an answer from someone, use a service like Quoted. There are plenty of experts in all fields, all over the place who are ready to give an opinion and you can use that in your content. The next one is using fresh specific examples, like that one's pretty self-explanatory. And here's the other thing that I worked is like staying consistent. Now again, I haven't been consistently posting new blog posts, but I have been posting transcripts of podcast episodes every week to my blog, like I have been getting those out. So I'm thinking that helped a little bit. If you listened to last week's episode with Lindsay from Conductor, you know she mentioned increasing blog content output. Like if you can do that, great. If you can 10 times your content, great. AI engines do need fresh content. But if not, just stay on your regular publishing schedule. To help stay consistent with content on my website, I've started scheduling content a month in advance. And again, I know that's content marketing 101, but I thought I'd mention it in case you're like me and you're like last minute on everything. So based on everything we know so far, it seems pretty clear that AI models value clarity, context, and authenticity. Let me try it. It's been, my tongue is not working. Anyway, this is a little bit different. The value in clarity and context and authenticity is a tiny bit different than standard SEO. SEO, you need those backlinks, you need those keywords, but backlinks don't matter as much as you'd expect when it comes to like AEO or GEO. In this tiny shift in how that we're tackling content marketing is a huge opportunity for smaller teams and independent marketers. If your content is structured, if it's helpful, if it's genuinely insightful, you can appear right beside major publishers and AI results. I know because I did it. So when it comes to this podcast and what's next for experimenting, I'm going to keep creating valuable content, but I'm also going to keep testing it and I'm going to keep yapping about it because I want to understand how AI search engines decide who gets cited based on things like content freshness, brand mentions, and author and entity signals. And I want to share that with you because the entire point of this podcast is just so that we learn together in real time. So if you're curious about how to make your own content more visible in AI search to keep following along, we're going to keep talking about it. And I'm sharing every experiment and every win in my new weekly newsletter, the Visibility Report. Okay. I am Cassie Clark and this is Founded AI. As always, if you want help future-proofing your content strategy, you know where to find me, LinkedIn or at CassieClarkMarketing.com. Okay. Remember keywords got us those clicks, insights get us cited. I will see you next week.