Write the best page on your own site and you still might not get cited. AI engines answer a buyer's question by quoting a Reddit thread, a YouTube video description or a round-up blog instead of any vendor's homepage more often than most marketers expect. If your brand isn't mentioned inside that thread or that video, your own content never gets a chance to compete.
Buyer asks: “best tool to track if my brand shows up in chatgpt and gemini answers”
A few names come up often for this. Profound and Otterly get recommended in most recent comparisons, and there's a well-regarded Reddit thread that benchmarks five options side by side if you want more detail before picking one.
Notice the source: a public discussion thread outranks every vendor's own page for this answer. If your name isn't in that thread, publishing a better landing page on your own site won't fix it.
Why does AI cite a Reddit thread instead of a company's website?
AI engines weight pages by how well they answer the exact question asked. Domain ownership doesn't factor in. A forum thread with five specific, opinionated answers to "which tool should I use" often reads as more useful than a vendor's marketing page, which the engine treats as biased toward one answer: itself. The same goes for a YouTube video that walks through several options on screen, or a round-up blog that already did the comparison work. Engines quote whichever page answers the question most directly, regardless of who wrote it.
Which pages are AI engines already citing in your category?
Every category has a small set of pages doing most of the work. Run your buyer's real questions through Koalr's AI Search Index and it comes back with the exact sources each engine pulled from, not just the brands it named. In a recent 30-day scan across one set of tracked prompts, the highest-citation sources outside any single vendor's own website looked like this:
None of those four pages belongs to a tool vendor. All four keep getting quoted because they already answer the buyer's question well, and none of them mentioned Koalr in that scan. Closing this gap means getting your name into the pages already winning the citation, not building a fifth landing page and hoping it competes with them.
How do you get listed in the threads and videos AI already cites?
Getting into an existing high-citation page is a different job than writing a new one. It takes a specific, useful contribution.
Off-page moves that earn a real mention
- Answer the thread directly with real detail, not a one-line plug: generic links get downvoted and skipped by AI retrieval, substantive answers get quoted
- Reach out to the creator of a high-citation YouTube video and pitch a specific tie-in to their exact topic, not a generic sponsorship ask
- Pitch round-up and listicle editors with one clear paragraph: the strongest use case you cover, plus a fact they can paste in without editing
- Offer a short, ready-to-use quote to newsletter and blog authors so adding you costs them no extra work
- Make sure any placement states what your product does in plain text: captions and pinned comments get retrieved, vague mentions don't
See where your brand shows up in AI search
Enter your website and get your AI Visibility Score across 7 engines. First score in under 5 minutes, no setup.
Does this replace writing your own pages?
No. Off-page placements and your own content answer different parts of the same problem, and most brands need both.
Content you own
- Your comparison and feature pages
- Your own FAQ and documentation
- Full control over accuracy and framing
- Takes time to earn trust and citations on its own
Content you don't own
- Reddit threads, YouTube videos, LinkedIn newsletters
- Round-up and listicle blogs already ranking for the question
- Already trusted by the engine for this exact question
- Requires direct outreach to the page's owner
The second column moves faster. A page you publish today has to earn its own citations from scratch. A thread or video an engine already quotes can start citing you the next time it re-answers the question, once your mention is added.
Start with the sources already earning citations
Guessing which forum thread or newsletter to pitch wastes outreach on pages an AI answer never surfaces. Run a free scan at koalr.ai and Koalr's Sources view shows you exactly which pages each engine cited for your category's real buyer questions, so your next outreach email targets a source that already earns the citation you want. For more on how the underlying tracking works, see how to track if your brand shows up in ChatGPT and Gemini answers, and for the gaps this off-page work is meant to close, see how to find out which AI engines are citing your competitors instead of you. Questions about your score go to hello@koalr.ai.
Frequently asked questions
Off-page GEO is the practice of getting your brand mentioned inside content you don't control, such as forum threads, YouTube videos, newsletters and round-up blogs, so that AI engines cite you when they quote those already-trusted pages. It complements on-page GEO, which is the content you publish and optimise on your own site.
