The AI Citation Game Is Rigged (in Your Favor)

TL;DR: Quora, Reddit, Grok chats, and an AI-friendly SEO tune-up can put your startup in AI answers. Even if you’re invisible in Google.

Author

Varnan Labs
August 12, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

1. Real Talk

AI isn’t “discovering” your content the way Google did in 2015.

Instead, it’s pulling answers from high-authority domains it already trusts and from whatever your site structure + crawlability allows it to find.

Data that matters:

  • Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, NYT, NerdWallet are the top-cited sources in Google AI Overviews.

  • ChatGPT Plus sometimes uses Google crawler traditional SEO ranking signals still feed into AI answers.

  • Grok & ChatGPT index public chats, meaning your posts there can be baked into future responses.

  • In a 50k+ site study, 27% had duplicate site versions, 52% had broken links, and 69% had orphan pages. All crawl killers for AI bots.

If you’re invisible on high-authority “waterholes” and your site’s technical SEO is broken, you’re invisible in AI answers.

Take these Actions for you Startup

Control both sides of AI discovery:

  1. Own the “waterholes”: 
    Seed high-authority domains (Quora, Reddit, LinkedIn) with fact-rich content in your niche.

  2. Hijack the chats: 
    Drop key facts into public Grok/ChatGPT threads clean, quotable, fact-dense.

  3. Fix your crawl & index health: 
    Eliminate duplicate versions, fix broken links, implement AI sitemaps, and add schema markup.

  4. Serve the chunks AI wants: 
    Use short, self-contained text blocks so AI can lift answers without rewriting.

Try These

  • Waterhole Injection: 
    Publish 3–5 answers on Quora/Reddit with original stats or industry insights. 40–60 words each, clean and quotable.

  • Chat Seeding: 
    Write a concise explainer of your market/problem/solution and post it in a relevant Grok public chat.

  • Duplicate Killer: 
    Redirect all HTTP/WWW versions to one HTTPS root domain.

  • Index Insurance: 
    Check GSC for “Crawled, currently not indexed” pages and fix content quality issues.

  • Broken Link Sweep: 
    Replace or redirect any internal/external links leading to 404s.

2. Tools We Actually Use

Tool

What It Does

Best For

Keyword Insights

Find Niche, question based queries

Seeding Q&A content on Quora/Reddit

Google Search Console

Monitors crawl/index issues

Technical SEO fixes

3. Steal This

This prompt turns ChatGPT into a forensic analyst. We’ve used it to see exactly which sources an LLM trusts in my niche, and to pull unconventional growth tactics from competitor histories. 

------------------------------
EQUITY RESEARCH ANALYST PROMPT
------------------------------

“You are an equity research analyst. Produce a rigorous, source-backed investment memo on {Company} [{Ticker}] with a clear Buy, Hold, or Sell call.

Rules for research and writing
1) Use only verifiable, recent sources. Prioritize official filings, earnings materials, investor presentations, regulatory documents, reputable industry data, and high quality media. Cite every non-obvious fact with a link and date.
2) Separate facts from interpretation. Tag each paragraph as Fact, Analysis, or Inference.
3) Use precise dates. Avoid vague time references.
4) Quantify claims. Show math for deriv.....


NOTE: This is not the full prompt. Click Below to the the full prompt

For Full Prompt, Click Here!

4. From the Community

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