Your brand can appear in Google results without appearing in the sources an AI answer cites. Before commissioning another article or starting an outreach campaign, it helps to understand which pages are actually informing the answers your buyers see.
In this webinar, Gintare Rimolaityte, Chief Commercial Officer at Trendos, explained how to map those sources by industry and engine, then turn the gaps into a practical worklist. Her examples covered consumer products and retail, IT and solution services, and communication services.
The central point was not to abandon SEO. It was to stop treating search rankings as a complete picture of AI visibility.
Start With The Citation Map, Not Just The Search Results #
Rimolaityte contrasted a page of search results with an AI answer whose sources may require an extra click to inspect. Monitoring whether your brand appears in the answer is useful, but it does not explain which sources contributed to that response.
Looking at those sources reveals a different set of decisions: whether to improve owned content, build a presence on relevant review sites, contribute to community discussions, or pursue editorial coverage.
In the summer 2026 examples she discussed, community and user-generated sources were prominent across the three industries. The remaining mix varied, making a universal list of sites to target a poor substitute for examining your own category.
These were observed citation patterns in Trendos’ analysis, not a formula that guarantees inclusion in an AI answer. Rimolaityte repeatedly encouraged attendees to check their own brands, competitors, and industries.
Match Your Content And Outreach Priorities To Your Industry #
The industry comparisons showed why the same budget should not automatically go to the same activities for every business:
- Consumer products and retail: Brand and retail-owned sources played a substantial role alongside communities. Rimolaityte pointed to clearly organized product information, including names, descriptions, and specifications, as a useful model for making facts easy to retrieve.
- IT and solution services: Review sites, editorial sources, and community content featured prominently. Her examples included G2, Reddit, YouTube, and technology publications, making external evidence an important complement to a vendor’s own product claims.
- Communication services: Community content and independent editorial sources were important in the examples. That suggested work beyond owned pages, including relevant discussions, reviews, and coverage.
Rimolaityte interpreted the retail pattern partly through content structure: product pages often make specific facts easy to locate. For other businesses, she suggested clear question-and-answer content rather than assuming every page should look like an ecommerce listing.
That is a starting hypothesis to test, not evidence that short answers alone cause citations. Use the sources returned for your actual customer questions to decide which changes deserve attention.
Check Engines Separately Before Declaring A Source Irrelevant #
A change in one engine does not establish a trend across all AI search. Rimolaityte used Reddit as an example: reduced prominence in ChatGPT did not mean it had disappeared from the other engines she examined.
She also described differences in the balance of community, editorial, and brand-owned sources across Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini. In her examples, Gemini’s source mix was particularly dependent on industry.
The practical implication is to keep engine-level results visible in your reporting. A combined total can obscure where a source remains useful and where it no longer contributes as much.
There is also a reason to participate in communities beyond AI citations. If customers already discuss your category on Reddit, those conversations can be valuable in their own right. Rimolaityte recommended honest participation from a company or employee voice rather than disguised accounts or a promise that presence can simply be bought.
Turn Competitor Citations Into A Specific Worklist #
Rimolaityte’s audit begins with 10 to 20 questions customers might ask while choosing a product or provider. Topics and keyword research can help develop that set, but the questions need to reflect the buying decision you want to understand.
Run the questions in the engines relevant to those buyers, record the cited sources, and group them by type. Then inspect the pages where competitors appear and your brand does not.
Gintare Rimolaityte explained why those gaps deserve attention:
“If your competitor appears in those sources and you don’t, this is your opportunity to get the mention on the source because this source is already being used to get the answer, right?”
The opportunity is more specific than a general request for more brand mentions: you have a source URL, a customer question, and an existing competitor reference to investigate. It still requires judging whether your business genuinely belongs on that page and what a useful contribution would be.
Do not give every discovered domain equal priority. Rimolaityte recommended examining citation share and which source categories drive answers for your industry, rather than chasing thousands of editorial sites indiscriminately.
The full citation-audit walkthrough connects those steps to the industry comparisons and shows how the findings can guide content and outreach priorities.
Use Video To Answer Real Questions Clearly #
During the Q&A, attendees asked whether cited YouTube content had to come from users rather than a company or its founders. Rimolaityte said brand and founder content could also be useful; her recommendation was to make it insightful and clearly structured.
She emphasized concise question-and-answer formats and accurate transcripts. When asked how to track a planned series of video FAQs, she suggested checking whether the channel or its content appeared among the sources for the prompts being monitored.
That gives a video project a more concrete measurement plan than publishing a batch and hoping for visibility. Identify the customer questions first, make the answers useful, and track the relevant sources over time. A transcript supports that work, but does not guarantee a citation.
Make The Audit Actionable For Your Team Or Client #
An agency attendee asked what to do when they could recommend changes but could not implement them. Rimolaityte advised preparing a concise, client-specific report that identifies the gaps and gives the client a to-do list.
Watch the full session for the source comparisons and audience Q&A. To turn the approach into work your team can use, start with a focused audit:
- Choose a manageable question set. Start with 10 to 20 buying questions for one product or service category rather than trying to represent the entire business at once.
- Record answers and their sources by engine. Keep the prompt, observation date, and cited URLs together so later checks compare like with like.
- Separate source types. Distinguish owned and retail pages, communities, reviews, and editorial coverage before choosing where to invest.
- Inspect competitor gaps. Read the relevant cited pages and identify a legitimate next step, such as correcting product information, improving a listing, or proposing useful coverage.
- Assign owners and review the pattern again. Give content, outreach, community, or client teams specific tasks, then repeat the checks to see whether the source mix and brand presence change.
Join Us For Our Next Webinar! #
ChatGPT Ads & GEO: A Roundtable With Go Fish Digital & OpenAI
Join us as Patrick Algrim, VP of GEO, and Ashish Jacob, GEO Search Manager, both at Go Fish Digital, work through the organic side of AI visibility, joined by Abhilash Edathil, Head of SMB Monetization at OpenAI, who will share his perspective on ChatGPT Ads.