A weird pattern I'm seeing for getting cited by AI search
I've been obsessing over how to get mentioned by AI engines, and I stumbled on something that feels totally backward.
I was digging into why an AI model cited one article and completely ignored another on the exact same topic. The article that got the mention wasn't better. The data wasn't clearer. It just had one thing the other didn't, a direct quote from a person.
The AI literally pulled the quote, "According to Jane Doe, 'the key is...'" and cited that article. The other one, which just stated the facts without attribution, was invisible.
My working theory is that the models learned what's "citable" from news articles and academic papers. In that world, a quote from a named person is a gold-standard source. A sentence stating a fact is just a sentence. But that same sentence attributed to a person is treated like evidence.
It makes me think the old-school PR play of getting your founder quoted in industry pubs has a totally new purpose. It's not just for the backlink. It might be how you feed the AI quotable facts.
Anyone else seeing this or testing something similar?