[SESSION RECAP] Earn the Answer: What It Takes To Get Cited By AI

A billion people ask ChatGPT questions every single week. Some of them are asking about you. If you missed our live session on July 30, Earn the Answer: PR and AEO Tactics That Get You Found in AI Search, here's what B2B marketers, agency leads, and business owners need to know.

Orange Marketing CEO Rebecca Gonzalez teamed up with Evan Nierman, founder and CEO of Red Banyan, an international PR and crisis management firm, to talk about why old-school PR has become one of the most important levers for showing up in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Rebecca covered the AEO mechanics behind AI visibility, while Evan explained why classic PR tactics, like rankings, reviews, and press coverage, are what earn a brand a citation.

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Session Takeaways

Third Party Sources Drive Most AI Citations

Evan opened with the scale of the shift: ChatGPT alone has a billion weekly users asking questions about companies, credibility, and who to trust. Add in Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, and the move away from traditional Google search is significant. According to McKinsey's Global AI Survey, 55% of searches are already shaped by AI-generated summaries.

According to Muck Rack, 84% of the citations AI tools pull from come from third-party sources. Only a small fraction point back to a brand's own website.

That statistic sets up most of what follows. AI tools aren't primarily reading a company's homepage and deciding it's credible; they're cross-referencing what other people and publications say about it. The proof signals that came up repeatedly in the session:

• Customer reviews and testimonials
• Industry rankings and publication mentions
• Case studies
• Awards and recognitions
• Podcast and webinar appearances
• Press releases and newswire distribution
• FAQs, schema, and clear website structure

A company's website still matters, but if the only source saying it's credible is the company itself, AI may not have enough outside evidence to recommend it.

PR Isn't Just for Big Budgets

PR is often treated as something only Fortune 500 companies with large budgets can invest in, while smaller teams assume it's out of reach. Evan's point: PR is simply a way to build the one asset every company already owns, its reputation, and most of the moves that build it don't require an agency retainer:

• Op-eds and bylines in industry publications
• Award submissions
• Podcast and webinar guest spots
• Contributed quotes for reporters
• Consistent LinkedIn thought leadership
  

Orange Marketing's Own Turnaround

Rebecca shared Orange Marketing's own numbers. Organic search traffic had declined steadily since Q1 2022, and the recovery began once the team doubled down on PR fundamentals: a monthly press release, consistent case studies, and active review collection. One change that helped: adding a "How did you hear about us?" question to every form, which showed how much traffic was coming from AI rather than Google.

Where Google's Advice Falls Short

Rebecca also discussed Google's recent SEO guidance, which still centers on structured content and clean headers, since that's what Google controls. But Google doesn't own Claude or ChatGPT, so its advice covers only part of the picture. HubSpot's research points to a few things that matter specifically for AI:

• Freshness is a citation signal. Stale, undated pages are dropping out of AI search results.
• Blogs matter more than expected. 60% of HubSpot's AI citations come from blog posts.
• LinkedIn is now a cited domain in AI, which wasn't the case even a year ago.
  

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Platform Ownership Explains a Lot

It was noted that there's a pattern behind which platforms show up in AI answers, tracing back to who owns what. Microsoft owns LinkedIn and backs ChatGPT. OpenAI has a data partnership with Reddit. Google owns YouTube, which feeds Gemini. That's why LinkedIn and YouTube content increasingly surfaces as AI sources, and why technical audiences may find traction on Reddit.

A Case Study That Generated a Terrific Lead

Rebecca also shared a case in point how a prospect asked ChatGPT for HubSpot agencies that migrate from Eloqua, and Orange Marketing's own Eloqua-to-HubSpot case study surfaced in the answer. The prospect reached out already convinced, and the deal closed with almost no negotiation. Case studies naming a specific technology or migration path are exactly the kind of concrete, answerable content AI pulls from. Vague "we help companies grow" case studies don't get cited the same way.

Five Moves You Can Make This Week

Evan and Rebecca closed the session with a short list of actions any team can start on regardless of size or budget.

1. Get one third-party mention this quarter. An op-ed, an award application, a podcast appearance.
2. Publish case studies consistently. Evan's team targets three to four new ones per quarter.
3. Pick one channel and commit. LinkedIn, Reddit, wherever your audience is, rather than spreading thin.
4. Ask the LLMs directly. Have Claude or ChatGPT tell you what people ask about your services, then build content around the answers.
5. Do a quick technical pass. Turn headers into questions, add FAQs, check your schema, and confirm nothing's blocked from crawlers.

Getting Found Is Only the First Step

Building enough credibility to appear in AI search can help new prospects discover your company. But what happens after they enter your database?

If your emails are landing in spam, getting filtered out, or reaching an audience too infrequently to maintain a healthy sender reputation, that new visibility may never translate into conversations or pipeline.

Join Orange Marketing CEO Rebecca Gonzalez and ZeroBounce Director of Email Deliverability Luke Glasner for Inbox Denied: What’s Really Blocking Your B2B Email and How to Fix It, a live Q&A covering how to recognize deliverability problems, repair a damaged sender reputation, and find the right sending frequency to protect inbox placement and ROI.

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