It’s no secret that guest posting remains a powerful link building technique, especially in the AI era of search.
However, it isn’t as straightforward as you would imagine, and a lot can go wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing.
This is exactly why I decided to write this article. Stay tuned to learn why guest posting is more popular than ever, how people are abusing this right now, and some tips for using this strategy with success.
Let’s get right into it.
Why Guest Posting Is More Powerful Than Ever
Guest posting has become much more powerful with the surging popularity of LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.
The AI SEO statistics (source) speak for themselves:
- ChatGPT has over 5 billion monthly visits
- Google AI mode has 100 million users in the US and India
- AI Search Traffic has increased 527% year on year
But how does this relate to guest posting specifically?
Well, it turns out that these AI models love to consume as much information as possible from places like Reddit, YouTube, and niche websites.
By posting content on these platforms, it’s possible to get it cited in AI for specific search terms. Guest posting is just one way of achieving this goal.
It took agencies and SEOs some time to figure this pattern out, but we’ve been doing this for clients for over a year – back in September last year, I wrote an article on this specific topic.
This means that you not only get the do-follow link from the guest post, which supports traditional SEO, but you can also pick up AI citations, which ultimately leads to referral traffic that is more likely to convert.
How This Is Being Abused
If guest posting is an effective method of getting cited in AI, you can probably already imagine (or may have already seen with your own eyes) how this can be abused.
The main way that people abuse this is by publishing lots of listicle articles, where they position their brand as the best option for a specific query.
This influences AI to then recommend the brand when a user searches for something related to the query.
Guest posting is nothing new, but the sheer amount of listicles being published on subpar websites is not staggering.
Quality control has been thrown out the window, and people are publishing as many listicles as they can with AI content on link farms.
How To Stay Ahead Of The Curve
Firstly, I’d highly recommend reading the article I wrote about how things will change beyond the listicle approach, as this outlines how things are likely to change in the AI visibility space.
The general idea is to get your brand published on reputable websites – not mom blogs – to position your brand as a credible leader within its niche.
Also, while listicles are great for AI visibility, other queries can also be targeted that are not always best solved with a listicle. For Spyndle, this means diving deep into voice-of-customer data to discover pain points and then solving these with guest articles that position our clients as the best solution.
Also, some effort should be put toward getting your brand features in existing listicles that dominate AI citations. These tend to be a lot more authoritative and have a better chance of remaining as a top source used by AI for the long term.
3 Tips For Choosing The Right Sites To Work With
Here are, in my opinion, some of the most important tips for choosing a website to publish a guest article on.
1. Niche Relevance
Niche relevance is super important when choosing a website to publish a guest article on.
Vanity metrics like DR and traffic are quite easy to inflate, so I always recommend checking the actual site to see what type of content it publishes and what keywords it ranks for.
Going back to a point I made earlier, we see lots of websites using the listicle tactic and then publishing them on random websites like Mom or recipe blogs. It is only a matter of time until the LLMs start to be more picky about where they get their information from, so relevance is very important for building a long-term AI visibility program.
The ideal goal is to get featured on authority websites in your niche that have a long history of ranking for valuable, relevant keywords. In a perfect world, being featured in already-published, highly AI-visible content is the best thing you can do.
2. Basic Metric Checks
DR and traffic can be easily inflated, but you should still check to make sure the website has good metrics that are not just inflated.
This includes things like:
- Traffic history (is it consistent?)
- Organic traffic levels
- Traffic location
- Domain Rating or Domain Authority
- Outbound vs inbound links
Another important check is to actually visit the website and check out what content they are publishing. Some sites hide all sorts of content in odd places that they don’t want people to see, especially in the footer or unorganized categories.
3. AI Visibility
This one is quite new, and it is a metric that we have started to monitor a lot more in 2026.
Before working with a website to publish a guest article, I now highly recommend checking the AI citation metrics of the website, alongside all the other checks above.
If a prospective website is highly visible in AI, this means that any content you publish has a better chance of getting picked up as well, which becomes especially useful when publishing articles specifically for AI citations.
To do this, simply input the domain name into Ahrefs or Semrush and take a look at the citation metrics – it really is nothing different from checking the domain rating or traffic.
Bonus Point – Be Careful With Anchor Text And Target Pages
With any guest posting campaign, it’s obviously VERY important to make the anchor text profile natural, as well as the pages you are targeting.
Use a good mix of anchor text, including branded, partial match, and exact match and make sure to keep around 60% of links pointing to the homepage.
This will vary from project to project, but it’s very important to not overoptimize the anchor text and target page as this can lead to a manual penalty.
Does This Strategy Work For Every Niche/Situation?
At Spyndle, we specialize in B2B SaaS that offers high-ACV software, and this is for a very good reason.
Right now, AI referrals still account for only a very small percentage of referral traffic – we usually see between 1 and 5% for most cases. This means that focusing on AI visibility makes more sense for businesses that offer a higher value product or service – in our case, this means high-ACV SaaS.
The same strategy can work regardless of niche, but we believe it makes the most sense when traffic is extremely valuable to a business, and ideally, where competition is lower.
It also matters who your ideal customer is, and whether they are likely to research with AI or not. If you offer local gardening services in an aging community, then focusing more on traditional search presence could make more sense.
Another consideration is the variation of search terms that you can target. We love B2B SaaS so much because there is an almost endless number of long tail queries that users search when they are facing a specific problem within their business.
This means we can dig into customer data and position our articles around real-world solutions, rather than simply spamming as many listicles as possible.
Final Thoughts
The best results come when you focus on quality publications and target keywords based on real customer data – understanding the actual problems your prospects face, not just chasing volume.
If you can build your AI visibility strategy around that, it remains one of the most powerful and underutilized channels available in 2026, for both organic SEO and AI search.
