Why obscure tech sites and bot-built blogs may be shaping your AI search visibility more than legacy media ever could.
Let’s talk about the Three Horsemen.
“Aren’t there four?” you ask. “And aren’t they nasty dudes whose arrival portends bad stuff?”
Traditionally they are, but my Three Horsemen are of another variety – they relate to AI search citations, and they may not be on your radar.
Context
My team and I have spent the last three months getting our agency’s house in order in terms of its own AI search. In addition to monitoring and optimization for the agency, we keep an eye on presence for a range of our tech clients and have pulled diagnostic reports for myriad prospects – all of whom also fit under the rubric of tech.
What are we seeing regarding citations? As you would expect, bigger marquee media outlets get scraped a lot and thus matter.
However, three lesser-heralded types of media (aka The Three Horsemen) show up regularly in citations – in many cases more frequently than the big-sexy-legacy gang. These constitute a new breed of relevant media, if one that people have not much cared about to date.
Here’s a quick list to guide you:
1. Boy Scout Reviewers
These sites are the cloistered monks of the tech review world. They play it SUPER legit, meaning they do not take samples, receive affiliate commissions, or deal with PRs in any real or conventional way. They buy the products they test, are super sensitive to any external influence on the testing process and bring real RIGOR to the equation.
Examples include Rtings, and Tech Gear Lab. You probably never heard of them, but they are SUPER important if you sling consumer tech. We have seen them ranked in the top 5 most scraped sites by ChatGPT across at least 5 major tech subcategories.
2. Made-for-Bot Sites
As the name suggests, this group of sites is built primarily for non-human audiences. They are made for the hard working RAG bots your fave LLM sends across the internet for answers. These properties stick out like sore thumbs. They have low monthly visitors, super-specific graphic design (which is rarely pleasing to human eyes but which is structured in ways AI likes) and usually have very few authors contributing content, often only one person.
Examples would include Dock Universe, who is heavily cited in computing peripherals and ImproveWorkspace. In a recent analysis, the latter actually was more cited in a client’s category than PC Mag.
3. The Bullshit-icle
More a type of content than an outlet per se, bullshit-icles may not have a long life in the AI-search ecosystem, but, based on our data, they thrive now. For clarity, a bullshit-icle is a listicle that often runs on a brand blog or owned website. It ranks products or companies and typically places the owner of the site in the number one position. Companies include competitors in the list but these invariably rank lower down.
There are loads of old-skool SEO tricks around these things including link trading (i.e. put me on your list and I put you on mine), and paying-for-placement. If our work is a guide, categories that typically receive less coverage (the PR agency world, for example) tend to see bullshit-icles scraped more frequently.
While this is a bit sad and will only add to the slop out there, it makes intuitive sense. We believe, as AI search evolves, the tendency to scrape content that is simultaneously low-traffic and semantically close to a popular prompt will decline. For now, be happy that this crap is mostly for bots and your eyes and brain are spared.
It’s fine if this all feels strange. But it’s rooted in fact and your competitors probably haven’t figured it out yet, so use it to get a leg up on them.