Field note
Ask AI about AEO, and it cites Reddit
Logging every source the assistants cited about AI visibility, two domains towered over the rest.
While auditing my own field, I logged every source the assistants cited across a couple of hundred answers about AI visibility and AEO. Two domains towered over everything else: Reddit and arXiv. Forum threads and academic papers (not vendor blogs) are where the assistants go to explain this topic.
Below them sat a cluster of specialist agencies and tools, each cited a handful of times. The polished marketing pages of the big platforms barely featured at all.
This is the citation map, and it is the most practical thing an audit produces. It tells you exactly where to earn a presence: not "write more blog posts," but be present and credible in the specific places the assistants already trust for your category. For AEO that meant Reddit and the research literature. For your category it will be somewhere else (a set of directories, a trade publication, a community), and the only way to know is to look at who actually gets cited.
So find the sources behind the answers. That list is your to-do list.
See "citation" and "source authority" in the glossary, or the overview for how this fits the method.
New here? Start with the overview → · By Denes Csaszar · written in the open