What makes you searchable in AI? Here’s what my own data tells me.
II’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a brand show up in AI-generated answers. And recently I turned that lens on myself.
Here’s what I found.
The mechanics aren’t mysterious
LLMs cite sources that are novel, specific, and hard to find elsewhere. That 100 clicks / 40,000 citations split I discovered — one domain barely visible in traditional search, but treated as a trusted authority by AI — is a perfect example of the kind of counterintuitive, data-backed observation that gets referenced. You can’t manufacture that. You either have original insight or you don’t.
Named frameworks matter
When you articulate something clearly enough that others start using your language, you become the attributable source for that idea. That’s how entities get built in the AI era. Not by optimising a page, but by owning a concept. Things like:
- Citations ≠ clicks
- LLM visibility as a distinct service line, separate from SEO
- GEO as a permission slip for CMOs who wanted to stop caring about Google
The problem is where your best thinking lives
The insights that should be getting you cited are probably in the wrong places:
- LinkedIn posts
- Conference talks
- Client conversations
None of that gets indexed in a way that lets an LLM trace it back to you. If your thinking isn’t on your own domain, with consistent authorship signals, you’re donating your expertise to the aggregators who will eventually get cited instead of you.
Measurement is still a mess
Even when you are getting cited, you’re probably under-counting it. The signal is fragmented across:
- Bing’s AI Performance report
- Clarity’s Share of Authority
- GA4 referral tracking from AI sources
None of it is clean. None of it talks to each other.
The honest answer
What makes you searchable in AI comes down to three things: original research, clearly named ideas, and content that lives somewhere attributable.
The irony is that the people doing the most interesting work in this space are often the last ones to show up in the answers.
That’s worth fixing.
