AI cites what the public record already reveals about your brand. Here’s what that means for your content strategy, and where you actually start.
Every week, there’s a new framework for winning in AI search. New tactics, a new study, new takes on what this all means. And I get it, things are moving fast enough that ignoring it feels… irresponsible.
But when clients come to me asking whether they should be “doing AEO,” the first thing I want to know isn’t which tools they’re using or which prompts they are targeting. It’s this: what does the public record currently say about their authority?
Because AI doesn’t do keyword lookups.
Even when doing SEO these days, 99.5% of ranking pages don’t contain the exact query they aim to target in their display titles. Relevance is semantic, not literal.
AI citation works the same way; it draws on what it already understands to be credible about your brand across every surface it can read. If that body of evidence is thin, outdated, or missing entirely, no tactical optimization fills the gap.
How does AI decide what to cite about your brand?
By the time someone asks AI about your category, it’s already formed an opinion about your brand. A bylined article indexed six months ago, a LinkedIn post that got picked up in search, a YouTube transcript, a forum thread where someone mentioned your methodology.
AI rewards accumulated credibility.
It recommends real authorities with real solutions, lived experience and credible information to share, that’s been published somewhere it can actually be found.
So if your brand’s authority is trapped in your founder’s head, locked in PDFs, or circulating in internal Slack threads, it doesn’t exist to AI.
That’s where authority engineering comes in. The practice of building that web of authority everywhere AI is pulling from, in order to influence what AI finds.
Are Owned Channels Part of the Public Record?
When most people hear “public record,” they picture press coverage. Something external like a mention in a trade publication, a Reddit thread, or a review site.
And those are public record, but…
LinkedIn is also public. YouTube is public. Your website is public. Every article your team has ever published, every post from your founder, every video where someone on your team explains how something works — all of it is crawlable, citable, and sitting in the same index AI pulls from.
What you should be focused on isn’t whether your authority is owned vs. third-party. It’s whether it’s published vs. trapped.
Owned channels are often how your expertise enters the public record in the first place. Third-party citation occurs when expertise is specific and credible enough that others want to reference it (or cover it).
You’re not skipping the second part. You earn it by doing the first part well.
So, the Slack thread where your founder just explained something brilliantly? Not part of the public record. The LinkedIn post where she says the same thing, with enough specificity that people share it over and over? That’s building authority for you.
Before you touch your AEO strategy, answer this.
What does the public record currently say about your authority? If the answer is “not much,” you had better get to building.
The fastest path depends on what you’re working with. If someone in-house is willing to be the credentialed voice of the brand — a doctor, a founder, a scientist, a strategist — that’s your shortcut. Get their knowledge into formats AI can find and cite, like articles, LinkedIn posts, interviews, and on video.
The same core insights, across every surface that already has trust.
We’ve seen this work well. Recently, a client was lucky enough to have a credentialed in-house expert with a stellar public record, but it wasn’t being leveraged across owned channels. We built a strategy around changing that, and saw almost immediate AI citation gains.
These AEO gains were a byproduct of building upon real public evidence and credibility that was built over years independently.
If there’s no obvious in-house expert, the question shifts from “who is our authority” to “what does our brand know that nobody else does.”
Every brand has something proprietary trapped somewhere: outcome data, a methodology, a process, research that never made it past an internal deck.
That’s your raw material.
The work is getting it out into the public record in a form specific and structured enough that it’s worth citing. This can include your website, but also taking that information and distributing it across owned channels.
Influence what you have direct control over.
So, where do you start?
First, find out WHERE your easiest-to-leverage authority comes from. It could be a person, a dataset, a proprietary methodology; something your brand owns that’s interesting enough to be worth citing and hasn’t made it into the public record yet.
If there’s a person? Great! Get them on the record ASAP. Articles, LinkedIn, contributed pieces and video.
Think about where your audience already goes to learn and focus there first. Think less about volume and more about quality content; getting that specific, credible perspective published somewhere crawlable, then building from there.
If it’s knowledge rather than a person, it still needs a vehicle: a study page, a methodology explainer or something structured enough to be found and cited. Bonus: Make it interesting and unique enough that a journalist covering your space would want to reference it.
The brands showing up in AI search didn’t get there by cracking some formatting code. They just got their expertise out there earlier than everyone else.
Karli is content marketing consultant behind Wild Idea, a content marketing and SEO collective focused on driving big results. With over 12 years in the marketing industry, she’s worked with brands large and small across many industries to grow organic traffic and reach new audiences. She writes on everything from marketing, social, and SEO to travel and real estate. On the weekends, she loves to explore new places, enjoy the outdoors and have a glass or two of vino!
