Key takeaways

Ranking #1 on Google no longer gets you cited. Only 37.9% of AI Overview citations now come from the organic top 10, down from 76% eight months earlier.

Off-site brand mentions predict AI citation better than anything on your own website. A 75,000-brand Ahrefs study found the correlation about three times stronger than backlinks.

A single review profile (even one with a handful of reviews) can move a brand’s AI citation rate from 1% to 53.5%.

Reddit alone takes more first-citation slots in Google AI Overviews than 14 major publishers combined.

Author bio boxes, llms.txt files, and Markdown copies of your pages didn’t move AI citation in controlled tests. Stop funding them. Schema won’t win citations either — but keep it as entity infrastructure, not a citation lever.

AI pulls citations from the first 30% of a page far more than the rest.…