AI visibility has become one of the most highly-tracked metrics for brands in 2026 and beyond.
In this article, I’m going to go through three methods of increasing your AI visibility beyond the typical ‘just get more organic traffic’ advice.
These methods include guest posting, digital PR, and Reddit posts, and each has its own specific benefits for AI citations.
If AI visibility is on your radar for 2026, stay tuned.
Guest Posts
Guest posts, or sponsored posts, are when you publish an article on another website.
Most marketers, especially those with experience in SEO, should know about this tactic already. It is something that has been used for years to build links and increase organic traffic from Google.
How To Build Guest Posts For AI Visibility Specifically
Now, you might be wondering how guest posts actually help with AI visibility, and the answer is simple.
If you position your guest posts to target specific queries, you can get your brand cited for those terms in AI. If you do this process correctly, this means AI citations within a matter of days.
Popular AIs like ChatGPT and Perplexity frequently cite content from Google – plenty of research already shows this – see here and here. Now, they also use other sources and training materials like Reddit and Bing, but if you can get a guest post indexed and ranking in Google for a relevant term, it’s very likely to be used as a source for relevant prompts in AI.
This doesn’t just mean ChatGPT either; we’ve seen guest articles be cited across the following AIs within weeks of being published:
- ChatGPT
- Perplexity
- Grok
- Google AI Mode
- Gemini
- Copilot
- Claude
In order to get AI visibility, you need to follow a few rules.
1. Work With Reputable Websites That AI Loves
When it comes to guest posting, you want to make sure that the site you work with is reputable and won’t harm the reputation or SEO of your domain.
You should look at a few different metrics, including but not limited to:
- Domain Rating
- Traffic History
- What Keywords Does the Site Rank For?
- Traffic Origin
- AI Citations (A great indicator of whether AI likes the site or not)
- Niche Relevancy
If you consider these carefully, you can get a guest post that will not only be cited in AI, but will also contain a relevant link back to your website (if you choose).
Unlinked brand mentions can also work well here, and you can learn more about how these differ from regular backlinks here.
2. Target The Right Search Terms
This is the most important part of the process.
AIs often cite Google results, but they don’t cite all content equally. It’s important to focus on search terms that are highly citable – for SAAS, this means listicles, use-case pages, and comparisons.
See this article on a recent Ahrefs study that confirms how widely cited ‘Best Of’ lists are in ChatGPT.
If you ask ChatGPT what the best software for X is, it has to rely on relevant information to produce its answer. This typically means reading all of the latest listicles and making a decision based on the data it finds.
You can see what sources are used, and then reverse engineer from that the type of site you should work with if you want to get cited for this term.
3. Prioritize Quality Content
Once you’ve decided on a website to work with and figured out a term you can actually get cited for, the next hurdle is content quality.
To increase your likelihood of being cited:
- Prioritize high-quality, human-written content.
- Make your content easy to read and digest, and include images/lists/internal links/external links.
- Include a summary at the top.
Now, you can really get into the nitty-gritty with optimizing content for AI.
However, from our experience getting SAAS clients cited in AI, you just need to follow most of the ‘regular’ SEO best practices. There isn’t really a magic shortcut like including a 100-word snippet at the start of the article, or anything else that will guarantee a citation.
Just write a great article that frames your brand in a positive light, and follows your tone of voice, and you’ll be setting yourself up for success.
Digital PR
Now,onto digital PR.
When we talk about digital PR, we’re usually referring to one of two methods:
Method One – Journalistic Outreach as an Expert
This is one of the most common ways to build brand mentions via digital PR. The process is pretty much the same regardless of what platform you use:
- Sign up as an expert on a journalistic platform like Qwoted
- Respond to relevant media stories as an expert in your niche
- Get quoted in said stories, with a brand mention and a link
These types of brand mentions are valuable because you get access to the highest quality websites on the web, which don’t often allow people to pay to be featured.
The stories that you get featured in may also attract AI citations, depending on the topic. So, this tactic can be hit or miss for AI citations directly, but if you land a good feature, the payoff can be massive.
Let’s also not downplay the benefit of these links for regular SEO as well.
Method Two – Viral PR/Newsjacking
The next method that is often used is viral PR – this involves publishing timely news pieces that get picked up by media and syndicated across multiple platforms.
When done properly, this can result in hundreds of links and exposure for your brand. However, it isn’t the most effective tactic for targeting specific queries to be cited in AI.
Reddit Posts
Now, anyone who has used Google over the last couple of years will have noticed how Reddit threads have started to dominate the SERPs.
This all started back in September of 2023, when Google started to release helpful content updates that directly hit the majority of niche websites. Google made a clear stance that it preferred forums and threads, compared to niche websites.
It would then later be revealed that Google struck a deal with Reddit to use Reddit’s data to train its AI models.
Coincidence?
I think not.
Anyway, Reddit is now a behemoth and gets an insane amount of monthly traffic from Google. It is also very highly cited in pretty much every AI.
To bring this back to the topic of this article, marketers have started to pick up on this trend and now use various tactics like Reddit commenting and writing threads with the goal of ranking in Google and, eventually, AI for specific search terms.
Some Reddit threads get thousands of visitors every month directly from Google and rank for valuable keywords, as well as being highly citedin AI – so the idea is to use this system to direct traffic from Reddit to a brand.
As you can already imagine, this takes a lot of technical knowledge and preparation, but when used correctly, it can be an extremely powerful tool.
Let’s say, for example, you worked for a computer monitor brand and wanted to get cited in AI for the term ‘best computer monitor’.
Looking at the SERPs, would you have a better chance of being featured in rtings.com or commenting on the Reddit thread that ranks in position 4?
Obviously, this varies from niche to niche, but you would be surprised at how much traffic and how many AI citations some of the top Reddit threads in your niche get.
Specificity Is Key
AI citations, in general, make a good metric to track and aim to increase.
However, the more specific you can be with the terms that you target, the better the ROI for your brand.
We have an entire article that goes into using your customers’ words to generate sales or demos directly from ChatGPT, and this is a great starting point when planning out the AI citations you want to appear for. You can find this here.
This explains why the more control you have over the terms you get cited for, the better the results for your brand.
So, Which Is Best?
The truth is, it depends on what your goals are.
Guest posts, digital PR, and Reddit posts can all work extremely well for AI visibility – you just need to know what you’re doing.
If I had to categorize them by their strengths, it would look something like this:
- Guest Posts – Ideal for repeatability and targeting specific search terms. You can get fast results and have lots of control over your brand’s voice and how it is positioned.
- Digital PR – Ideal for securing brand mentions on the most editorial websites. However, harder to control AI citations and focus on specific terms.
- Reddit Posts – Ideal for virality and referral traffic; however, this requires a lot of work and technical knowledge of the platform. It’s also a longer-term play, and competition is fierce.
You should understand how all of these work at a minimum, and deploy them as tools to address gaps in your AI visibility.
