Community threads, review sites, directories and editorial round-ups take most of the citation slots. What to do about each kind, and what not to do.
Run a visibility check on almost any category and the same shape appears: your website is not among the cited sources. Other people's pages are. This is the part of AEO that has no technical fix, and it is also the part with the most room in it, because most companies are not working on it at all.
Here is what actually gets cited, and what to do about each kind.
Community threads
Reddit, Hacker News, Stack Overflow, and the two or three forums that matter in your niche. These get cited constantly, for a reason that is easy to miss: they contain the only genuinely unpaid opinions on the internet, written by people describing a specific situation. A thread titled "we're 12 people, what are you using for payroll" is a better match for a buyer question than any vendor page could be.
What works. Being a real participant. Answering questions in your area of expertise, including ones where the answer is a competitor. Disclosing who you are every time, without exception.
What does not. Fake accounts. Astroturfing. "Casually" recommending yourself. Communities detect this reliably, the punishment is a thread permanently associating your brand with the word "shill," and that thread is now the one being cited. This is a case where the downside is genuinely larger than the upside.
Realistic effort. An hour a week from someone who knows the product, sustained for months. It does not scale and it cannot be delegated to an agency. It also works.
Review sites
G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, and the vertical equivalents — Clutch for agencies, Avvo for lawyers, and so on. Structured, heavily crawled, and cited whenever a question has a comparison shape.
What works. Claiming your profile and completing it fully — the category, the description that matches your schema, pricing, integrations, screenshots. Asking recent customers for reviews, in a way that does not filter for happy ones. Responding to negative reviews in public, factually.
What does not. Incentivised review pushes, which the platforms detect and which produce a suspicious cluster of five-star reviews in one week. Also: leaving the profile half-empty for two years, which is the actual state of most profiles.
The detail people miss. Your category selection on these sites feeds directly into which comparison questions you appear for. Being in the wrong category is a common, silent, entirely fixable problem.
Round-ups and comparison articles
"Best X for Y", "N alternatives to Z", "X vs Y." These are the single most-cited page type for buyer questions, because they answer the question in the same shape it was asked.
What works. Making a writer's job trivial: a one-sentence description, the audience, the price, one honest limitation, a logo URL. Being genuinely differentiated enough that there is something to write. Following up when a page is updated rather than only when it is published.
What does not. Paying for placement in editorial round-ups — both ineffective and, when disclosed, a mark against you. Template outreach at scale, which every writer in your space receives forty of a week.
One more thing. Publishing your own round-up that puts you first is not this. It is a vendor page and it is read as one. An honest comparison page that is fair about where a competitor wins is a different object and does sometimes get cited, but the bar for "honest" is high and readers can tell.
Directories and marketplaces
App marketplaces, integration directories, industry association listings, local chamber listings. Individually weak, collectively useful, mainly as corroboration — they confirm that a company by this name exists in this category at this URL.
What works. The ten that are actually relevant to your industry, filled in completely and consistently.
What does not. The bulk-submission model. Two hundred directory listings with three different versions of your address is not evidence, it is NAP inconsistency at scale, and it costs you.
Editorial and trade press
Trade publications, analyst notes, mainstream coverage. High trust, high citation rate, slow and hard to get.
What works. Having something to say that is news — original data from your own product, a genuine funding or launch event, an informed position on something happening in your industry. Being responsive and quotable when a journalist does reach out.
What does not. Press releases about routine business, sent to a purchased list.
Reading your own citation profile
After a visibility run, sort the cited sources into these buckets and ask two questions of each: are we present, and if we are present, is what it says about us correct and current.
The second question catches more problems than people expect. An abandoned review profile with an old price, a directory listing with a dead URL, a round-up describing a product you retired — each of these is actively feeding wrong facts into the same pipeline you are trying to influence. Fixing a wrong mention is usually faster than earning a new one, and it is where we would start.