How to Pitch a Roundup Post Inclusion (With the Emails I Send)

This is the narrow version of a bigger topic. Choosing which roundups to pitch is the harder decision and finding out which ones AI engines even read is harder still. This post is only about the email.

The principle behind all of it

The author is not evaluating whether you deserve inclusion. They are estimating how many minutes you will cost them. Every choice below exists to lower that estimate.

If your email requires them to visit your homepage, work out what you do, decide where you fit, write a description in their format, and check a claim, you have asked for fifteen minutes. If it contains the row, formatted like their other rows, with one verifiable link, you have asked for ninety seconds. The second one gets answered.

Subject line

Name the article. "Addition for your 12 best AI visibility tools post" works because it is unambiguously about a thing they made.

What does not work, from watching our own reply rates: "quick question", "collaboration opportunity", "partnership", anything with their first name plus an exclamation mark, and anything that reads as though it was generated. People who write roundups get pitched constantly and they triage in the preview pane.

The body, in four parts

One line that proves you read it. Not "I loved your article", which proves nothing. Something only a reader would notice: which entry you disagree with, which one is now discontinued, the fact that the list is missing a price band.

The gap. One sentence about what the article does not currently cover, framed as a reader problem. "Someone landing on this with a $100/month budget has nothing to click" is a better argument than anything about your product.

The row, in their format. Open the article, copy the structure of an existing entry, fill it in with yours. Bold name, one-line summary, best-for, three bullets, whatever they use. Include a suggested position and say why that position, which is usually the middle. Asking for the top slot ends the conversation.

One verification link. A free tool they can run, a public pricing page, a screenshot. Something that resolves "is this real" in under a minute without a demo call.

Under 150 words total. Plain text. No attachments. Your signature is your name and a URL.

Three templates

Agency or consultancy blog. They want the article to make them look like the person who knows the space.

Subject: Addition for your "best AI visibility tools" post

Hi [name] — your entry on [tool] is the only writeup I've seen that mentions [specific detail], which is the thing most of these posts skip.

One gap: every tool on the list starts at $200+/mo. Anyone reading this who runs a two-person consultancy has nothing to click.

Suggested entry, in your format, around #7:

CueScout — best for solo consultants and small agencies. Tracks which pages AI engines cite in a category, not just whether you're named. From $59/mo. Good at: source-level tracking, weekly re-checks, agency-friendly pricing. Not for: enterprise teams who need SSO and seat management.

You can see the output without signing up here: [link to free tool]. Happy to be left out if it doesn't fit the piece.

— Telman

Affiliate publisher. Get the commercial question out of the way in the first email; everything else is wasted time until it is settled.

Subject: Addition + affiliate terms for your [category] roundup

Hi [name] — you're missing the sub-$100 band in [article], which is where a lot of your search traffic for "cheapest" queries is going to land.

We run an affiliate programme at [terms], 90-day cookie. Entry below in your format if it's a fit:

[row]

If your inclusion process is different, tell me what it is and I'll follow it.

— Telman

Independent writer or newsletter. They care about the piece being right and about being early.

Subject: [Article title] is missing a category now

Hi [name] — I've been following your list since the [month] update. Two entries in it changed since then: [tool A] moved to enterprise-only pricing and [tool B] shut down in [month].

There's also a category of tool that didn't exist when you wrote it: [one line]. We build one of them. Entry below if you find it useful, and no hard feelings if you'd rather cover a competitor — the update matters more to me than which name is in it.

[row]

— Telman

That last line is not a trick. If the piece gets updated and a competitor gets in, the list is still fresher, and the writer remembers who told them.

Finding the person, which is half the work

The templates are worthless if they land in a shared inbox. Three routes, in the order I try them.

The byline. If the article has an author name, look for their personal site or newsletter first. Most people who write roundups have a direct address on one of those, and an email to a personal address gets read in a way that hello@ never does.

The site's contributor page. Sites that run guest posts usually list an editor with an address. That editor either owns the piece or knows who does, and a two-line note asking who handles updates to a specific article is a low-cost way in.

The generic inbox, last. If you end up here, put the article title in the subject line and ask for a forward rather than pitching cold in the first message. You will lose some of these and it costs you nothing.

What I would skip: LinkedIn connection requests with the pitch attached, contact forms, and anything from a scraped email database. The first two get ignored and the third is how you end up in spam filters permanently.

Timing matters more than it should

Lists get updated in bursts, and landing in the window is most of what separates a yes from a polite nothing.

The obvious windows are the turn of the year, when every "best X for [year]" piece needs its number changed, and whenever something in the category visibly changes. A competitor shutting down, getting acquired, or repricing gives the author an actual reason to open the file. Pitching in that week is worth more than three pitches in a quiet month.

Watch the "last updated" line on your targets. If a piece was refreshed in March and again in September, you know roughly when the next pass is coming and you can arrive a week before it. This is unglamorous and it works better than anything in the email body.

When they say no, or nothing

Most will say nothing. That is the normal case and it is not personal; these emails arrive constantly and the reply rate for anything is low.

An actual no is more useful than silence and worth answering once, briefly, with thanks and nothing else attached. People change lists, move sites, and start newsletters. I have had two inclusions come from someone who declined a year earlier and remembered the exchange as pleasant.

A conditional no — "we only include tools we have tested", "we need an affiliate programme", "come back when you have more reviews" — is a specification, and it is the most valuable reply you can get. Write it down. If three list owners in your category all want the same thing, you have found a real gap in your business rather than a problem with your email.

The one reply worth pushing back on gently is "we already cover this category". If the existing entry is discontinued or has repriced out of the band, say so with the evidence and let them decide. That is a correction to their article, not a pitch, and it is usually welcomed.

Tracking it without a CRM

A spreadsheet is enough for the twenty targets you should be working. Columns I keep: article URL, host, how many of my questions it gets cited for, contact and how I found them, date sent, date followed up, outcome, and whether I was named in the answers afterwards.

That last column is the one people forget, and it is the only one that measures the actual goal. A placement that never changes an answer is a link, not a citation. Re-run your question set two to four weeks after a placement lands, because the page has to be recrawled before any engine can retrieve the version with you in it.

Follow-up

One, seven to ten days later, adding something the first email didn't have. A new data point, a launch, a change in the space. Two sentences. Reply on the same thread so they have context.

Then stop. A third email converts rarely and burns a person who might update the article next quarter.

The lines that get you ignored

Collected from replies and from asking people who run these lists what they delete:

• "I noticed you wrote about [topic]" with no evidence you read it
• "We'd love to explore synergies" or anything in that dialect
• Link exchange offers
• Attached PDFs and press releases
• Asking to be moved above a specific competitor
• Anything that needs a signup or a call to evaluate
• Bulk personalisation tokens that misfire, like a first name that is actually a company name

Realistic numbers

On lists you have properly qualified, expect somewhere between one in five and one in ten to say yes. On lists you found by searching your category and pitching everything, it will be far worse, and you will conclude outreach is dead when the real problem was target selection.

Twenty good targets per category is a quarter's work for one person doing it alongside other things. That is a small enough number that doing it well beats doing it at volume, which is a mercy, because volume is what made this channel unpleasant in the first place. The reason twenty is enough is the concentration in the 533-URL corpus study: the top thirty URLs carried 21% of all citation weight.