AEO citations: how to get your brand quoted by AI answers

Citations follow consensus, not rankings

Models assemble an answer from sources that agree with each other. A brand mentioned consistently across roundups, comparisons, forums and trade press gets cited. A brand with one excellent page and no third party mentions usually does not, even when that page ranks well.

That makes AEO an outreach problem as much as a content problem. Every earned mention is a vote in the consensus your category is built from.

What earns a citation

In practice the same properties keep showing up in cited pages.

• A clear, extractable answer near the top of the page, in plain sentences.
• Specific numbers, prices and dates the model can quote without hedging.
• A named author and a visible update date.
• Structured data and clean headings so passages can be lifted cleanly.
• Mentions on sources the model already trusts in your niche, including Reddit.

Reddit is an AEO channel now

Community threads are heavily represented in AI answers for product and comparison questions. A managed Reddit program, real subreddits, real topics, genuine participation, shows up in citations in a way that a press release never will.

Treat it like any other outreach channel: pick the subreddits with your buyers in them, agree topics with the brand before posting, and keep the thread list visible so nobody is guessing what was published.

Measure it like a channel

Track which queries mention you, which sources get quoted alongside you, and which of your placements those sources are. Then aim the next round of outreach at the gaps. That loop, placement, citation, gap, next placement, is the whole discipline.