Field note
Where AI actually looks for your category, and how to be there
To be in the answer, be where the assistant looks. Find your category's cited sources, then earn a place.
AI assistants don't invent their answers. They assemble them from sources they trust. So the practical question isn't "how do I rank?" It's "where does the assistant look for my category, and am I there?"
When I audited my own field, I logged the sources assistants cited across a couple of hundred answers about AI visibility. Two domains dominated: Reddit and arXiv: community threads and research papers, not vendor marketing (more here). That's my category. Yours will be different: maybe a trade publication, a set of directories, a particular community, a handful of analysts.
The method is the same regardless:
- Ask the assistants your category's real questions and list every source they cite.
- Read the list. The domains that show up again and again are where the answer is being built.
- Earn a genuine place there: contribute to the community, get included in the directories and round-ups, be referenced by the sources already cited. Assistants weight authoritative third-party sources far above your own marketing pages (see source authority).
The part that takes discipline: this is earned, not bought, and it's slow. You can't spam your way onto a list the assistant trusts. That's the opposite of trustworthy. But the list itself is the most useful map an audit produces: it turns "be more visible" into a specific, finite set of places to show up.
See the overview for how this fits the method.
New here? Start with the overview → · By Denes Csaszar · written in the open