Find the outlets AI answers cite before you pitch

Ask AI services the questions your buyers ask, log every site their answers cite, and rank the sites by how many of your questions cite them. The sites at the top are the ones these answers already rely on, so they’re the first places to pitch.

Download the source-opportunity log (Excel workbook, 340 KB). It uses only functions that Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice share, and we tested it in LibreOffice.

Choose 10 to 20 questions

Use the questions buyers ask before they pick a supplier, in their own words. Sales calls, search terms and support tickets are good places to find them.

• Leave your brand name out, so the answers show the category as a buyer meets it.
• Mix comparisons (“best payroll software for small firms”) with cost questions and the problems your product solves.

Check the services whose terms allow it

As we read their terms on October 15, 2026:

Service	How to check it
Google AI Overviews, AI Mode and the Gemini app	By hand. Google’s terms restrict automated access.
ChatGPT	By hand. OpenAI bars automatic or programmatic extraction.
Perplexity	API only. Its terms bar collecting information, even manually.
Microsoft Copilot	Consumer terms allow personal use only. Check your work account’s terms.

Terms change, so read the current version of each before you start.

Log every citation

Ask each question three times on each service, in a new chat each time and signed out where the service allows it. Answers vary between runs, and three runs show which sources keep coming back.

On the Log sheet, add one row per cited link, numbered in the order the answer lists them. An answer that cites nothing still gets a row with the link left blank, so it counts as an answer. Give each new site a source type.

Fifteen questions on four services, three runs each, comes to 180 answers. At two minutes an answer, that’s six hours.

Rank the outlets AI answers cite

The Shortlist sheet ranks sites by how many of your questions cite them, then by the number of answers, then by the number of services. Breadth comes first because a site cited for many questions is used across the category. A site cited ten times for one question is a narrower target.

Each site gets a suggested action from its source type:

Source type	Suggested action
News or trade publication, review site, newsletter, podcast, video channel	Pitch
Forum or community	Take part openly, as yourself
Reference site, such as Wikipedia	Check it for accuracy and follow its conflict-of-interest rules
Government or academic	Cite it in your own material
Brand or vendor site	Not a pitch target. Shows whose content the answers use.

Before you pitch

• Find the original story. Copies on aggregator sites count as separate sites in the log.
• Find the writer who covers your topic there, and the kind of story they run.
• Ask the same questions again in a month to measure the campaign’s effect on AI answers.

Limits

• The ranking is a snapshot of the day you collected it. Models and search indexes change.
• A citation shows an answer used a site. It doesn’t show the site will cover you.
• Three runs a question is a small sample. A site cited once may not come back.