How to get cited in Google AI Overviews

A citation is not a direct link from Google. It is a link from a source page that Google's AI model consulted. When you ask a buying question, like 'best project management software for small teams', the AI reads a set of pages it judges to be authoritative. It then synthesizes an answer, the Overview. The citations at the bottom are links to those source pages.

Your goal is to be on one of those source pages, mentioned in a relevant context with a link back to your site. This is a traditional link building and digital PR task. The only change is the target: you are now specifically hunting for pages that feed AI answers.

Start by searching for your core product or service category. Use question formats. For a company selling ergonomic office chairs, you would search 'best ergonomic office chair', 'what is the most comfortable office chair', 'ergonomic chair for back pain'. Note which searches trigger an AI Overview box at the top of the results.

Expand this list. Think about related problems your product solves, alternative names for it, and comparisons. 'Standing desk vs ergonomic chair', 'home office setup on a budget', 'chair for long hours gaming'. Manual search is sufficient. The goal is a list of 10 to 20 queries that reliably produce an AI Overview.

For each query on your list, open the AI Overview. Click every citation link. This opens the source page. You now have a target list. For our chair company, sources might include 'The Wirecutter's best office chairs', 'Healthline's guide to seating posture', and 'a Reddit thread on r/Workspaces'.

Analyze these pages. What is their format? Is it a curated list, a roundup, a review, a forum thread, a research summary? Who controls the page? Is it an editor at a publication, a community moderator, an independent blogger? The format and controller dictate your approach.

Not every source page is a viable target. Disqualify a page if your business cannot honestly be included. If the list is 'best ergonomic chairs of 2026' and your chair launched in 2021, you cannot pitch for inclusion. If the Reddit thread asks for personal experiences, you cannot pose as a user.

Prioritize pages you can genuinely contribute to. A 'definitive guide to home office ergonomics' might accept a contribution about chair selection criteria. A product comparison table might be open to adding a new row. A resource page for remote workers might add a link to your buying guide. The rule is simple: if you cannot write a truthful pitch, skip the page.

Find the correct contact. For a publication, find the editor who wrote the piece or covers the beat. Use LinkedIn or the site's contact page. For a community like Reddit, follow its rules for self promotion. For a resource page, find the site owner.

Your pitch must provide clear value to the page's audience. For our example chair company, a pitch to a health website might be: 'I noticed your guide to back pain at work mentions posture but not seating. We have a free, illustrated guide on how to adjust any office chair for lumbar support. It would fit well in your 'resources' section or as a footnote. Here's the link.' Include the link you want cited. The subject line should be specific: 'Addition for your guide on workplace back pain'.

A realistic response rate for cold, relevant outreach is between 5 percent and 15 percent. For every twenty qualified pitches, expect one to three replies. A reply is not a yes. It might be a request for more information, a fee, or a decline.

If you get no replies after a week, send one polite follow up to the same address. 'Just circling back on this in case it got buried.' If there is still no reply, stop. The opportunity is closed. Do not pitch the same page again with a different angle. Move to the next target on your list.

This process is manual, repetitive, and requires good judgment. The slowest parts are finding all the AI Overview source pages across many queries, and then drafting a unique, honest pitch for each one. A tool can systematize the search.

Mentionry runs an engine that finds these pages directly. You give it a domain. It identifies the buying questions in that category, finds the pages Google's AI reads for those questions, and drafts a pitch for each one. The drafting model is instructed to refuse if the business cannot honestly be included. This is not a database. It performs a fresh search and analysis for each run.