The CueScout blog
How brands get into AI answers
Research and playbooks on AI search visibility: which pages ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI cite, how engines choose the brands they recommend, and what it takes to earn a place in the answer. Most posts publish the dataset behind them, and every number is dated and sourced.
12 Best AI Search Visibility Tools (2026): Compared & Ranked, with Pricing
Twelve AI visibility tracking tools compared on engines, prompts per dollar, citation data, Reddit, Quora and Hacker News coverage, check frequency and published pricing, read from each vendor's own pricing page on 29 September 2026.
Read the postBeing Mentioned in AI Answers Is Not the Same as Being Recommended
A mention count scores 'named and ignored' identically to 'the one recommendation'. We read 63 stored answers a second way to separate them: what it cost, what it found, and what we refused to let a model decide.
How to Audit Brand Mentions in AI Engines
A brand audit for LLMs is four passes over one question list: build the list, run it on each engine, check the crawlers can reach you, then read the pages that got cited instead of you. With the numbers from our own audits, including the ones that embarrassed us.
I Put 63 Buying Questions to ChatGPT and G2 Was Cited Zero Times
The standard advice for AI visibility is to farm G2 and Capterra reviews. I collected 322 citations from 63 buying questions across 20 B2B categories in September 2026. G2 appeared zero times, Capterra once. A UK consumer-tech review site appeared 44 times. It is not a robots.txt problem, and the dataset is included.
Grok Cited X Posts 24 Times Across 36 Questions, and Every One Came From the Same Kind of Question
Everyone selling Grok optimisation says the same thing: Grok reads X, so post on X. We put 36 questions to Grok, ChatGPT and Perplexity, kept all 740 citations, and found Grok's X citations sit entirely inside one question shape. Buying questions got zero. Full dataset included.
The 533 URLs AI Reads About One Category: A Citation Corpus Study
We pulled every source three AI engines cited across 50 buying questions in the AI-visibility category, classified all 533 URLs, then fetched the top 30 pages to see who was named on them. Listing presence tracked visibility almost one to one. Full dataset included.
AI Citation Strategy: How to Get Into the Pages Answer Engines Read
An answer engine builds its recommendation out of a handful of pages it retrieved seconds ago. This is the guide to finding those pages in your category, working out which ones are reachable, and getting your name into them.
Listicle Link Building for AI Search Is a Different Job From Link Building
For Google you wanted links from strong domains. For an answer engine you want your name inside pages that get retrieved, and the link is close to beside the point. That changes which pages you chase.
How to Pitch a Roundup Post Inclusion (With the Emails I Send)
The email itself: subject lines, the four-part body, three full templates for the different kinds of list owner, what to do about follow-ups, and the lines that get you ignored.
How to Get Your Brand Into AI Recommendations
What it takes to be one of the names ChatGPT or Perplexity gives when someone asks for tools like yours: how the answer gets assembled, the four levers you actually have, and the order to pull them in.
How to Get Added to a "Best Tools" Listicle
The operational version: how to tell which lists are worth pitching, what the four types of list owner actually want, what they say yes and no to, and how long it takes to land.
How to Find Which Listicles ChatGPT Cites in Your Category
Every GEO post tells you to get into the best-of lists. None of them tell you which lists. Here is the manual method, what it costs you in time, and the tool we built because we got tired of doing it by hand.
Do Backlinks Help You Get Cited by AI? Perplexity Cited Ahrefs and Two Unknown Startups in the Same Answer
We went through the citations behind six buying questions in our scan data. One answer quoted Ahrefs, Semrush, and two tools with no backlink profile at all. Here is what that says about authority and retrieval, and where the argument runs out.
I Looked at Every URL Perplexity Cited for 6 Buying Questions. 14 of 23 Belonged to a Vendor.
A small, honest teardown of 23 URLs Perplexity cited across six buyer questions in our own database. Most of them were vendors' own marketing pages. One was a Reddit thread.
Does SEO Still Generate Inbound Leads, or Did AI Search Break It? (I Tried to Answer This on Reddit and Got Auto-Removed)
Someone in r/SEO asked whether long-term SEO still produces inbound leads now that AI answers everything. Our scanner has seen that exact question 13 times this month. Here's the answer, plus what happened when I tried to post it as a comment.
What a Reddit Buying Question Actually Looks Like: I Read All 148 Highest-Intent Threads
I read every thread our scanner has ever scored as strong buying intent, 148 of them across 50 subreddits, and wrote down the exact words people use when they're about to buy. Also how many were spam wearing a buyer's clothes.
11% of My Search Console Impressions Are Competitor-Monitoring Bots
87 of 777 impressions on cuescout.com came from queries with a dozen -site: operators in them. Zero clicks, average position 6.9, while the rest of the site sits at 53. Here's how to spot them in your own data.
I Got Shadowbanned Building a Reddit Tool
I built a tool to help people market on Reddit, and got shadowbanned trying to market it on Reddit. Here's exactly what happened, what Reddit actually punishes, and how to engage without getting nuked.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): How to Get Your Product Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of getting your brand recommended inside AI-generated answers. What GEO is, how the answer pipeline actually works, what the research and our own citation logs support, and what to do about it.
How AI Engines Decide Which Brands to Recommend
When ChatGPT or Perplexity recommends three tools, how does it pick them? A breakdown of what actually happens inside the answer, what our own citation logs show, and what any of it means for getting named.
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