Your brand can rank well in traditional search and still be invisible when an AI engine assembles an answer. Before you commission another article or scale outreach, the more important work is mapping the sources those answers actually cite.
Rankings are not the full AI picture
In a recent Search Engine Journal webinar, Gintare Rimolaityte, Chief Commercial Officer at Trendos, made one point repeatedly: do not abandon SEO, but stop treating rankings as a complete picture of AI visibility. An AI answer may show your brand without telling you which sources shaped it, and the cited pages often require an extra click to inspect.
Looking at those sources changes the worklist. Instead of producing more generic content, teams can decide whether to improve owned pages, build presence on review sites, contribute to community discussions, or pursue editorial coverage.
What the industry patterns showed
Rimolaityte walked through summer 2026 examples from three categories. Community and user-generated sources were prominent everywhere, but the rest of the mix varied enough that a universal target list would be a poor substitute for your own audit.
- Consumer products and retail: Brand and retail-owned pages played a substantial role alongside communities. Clearly organized product details—names, descriptions, and specifications—made facts easier to retrieve.
- IT and solution services: Review sites, editorial sources, and community content were prominent, including G2, Reddit, YouTube, and technology publications. External proof complemented vendor claims.
- Communication services: Community content and independent editorial sources mattered most in the examples, pushing work beyond owned pages.
These are observed citation patterns, not a guarantee of inclusion. The advice was to test the sources returned for your own customer questions.
Keep engine-level reporting separate
A shift in one engine does not establish a trend across all AI search. Rimolaityte used Reddit as an example: reduced prominence in ChatGPT did not mean Reddit disappeared from the other engines she examined. Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini showed different balances of community, editorial, and brand-owned sources; in some cases, Gemini’s mix was especially dependent on industry.
Practical takeaway: keep engine-level data visible. A combined total can hide where a source still contributes and where it no longer does.
Turn competitor citations into a specific worklist
The audit starts with 10 to 20 questions customers might ask while choosing a product or provider. Run those questions in the engines relevant to your buyers, record the cited sources, and group them by type. Then inspect pages where competitors appear and your brand does not.
Rimolaityte framed the opportunity directly: “If your competitor appears in those sources and you don’t, this is your opportunity to get the mention on the source because this source is already being used to get the answer, right?”
That creates a source URL, a customer question, and an existing competitor reference to investigate. It still requires judgment: decide whether your business genuinely belongs on the page and what a useful contribution would look like. Don’t chase every discovered domain equally. Prioritize citation share and the source categories that already drive answers in your industry.
Use video and clear Q&A formats
Brand or founder content on YouTube can also be useful if it is insightful and clearly structured. Rimolaityte recommended concise question-and-answer formats and accurate transcripts. To measure a planned video FAQ series, check whether the channel or content appears among the sources for the prompts you are monitoring.
Your citation audit checklist
- Choose 10–20 buying questions for one product or service category.
- Record answers and cited sources by engine with the prompt, observation date, and URLs.
- Separate source types: owned and retail pages, communities, reviews, and editorial coverage.
- Inspect competitor gaps and define a legitimate next step, such as fixing product information, improving a listing, or proposing useful coverage.
- Assign owners and repeat the checks to see whether the source mix and brand presence change.
AI visibility is becoming a source-inclusion game. The brands that win are the ones that map the citations, close the gaps competitors leave open, and track changes by engine—not the ones that keep producing content hoping the answer changes.
Source: Search Engine Journal
