Citation Engineering

Citation engineering is the deliberate practice of creating content assets, building authority signals, and distributing brand mentions in ways that maximize the probability of AI models citing your brand. It goes beyond content creation to encompass the entire ecosystem of signals that influence AI citation decisions.

This involves understanding what each AI platform uses to determine citation-worthiness: training data representation, real-time search ranking, content authority, cross-platform corroboration, and content format preferences. Citation engineering then systematically addresses each of these factors.

Practical citation engineering includes creating definitive industry resources that AI models reference, securing brand mentions in high-authority publications included in training data, building consistent entity information across directories and platforms, and producing fact-dense content with clear claims that LLMs prefer to cite.