End-to-end outreach workflow
Vince Nero
Vince is the Director of Content Marketing at Buzzstream. He thinks content marketers should solve for users, not just Google. He also loves finding creative content online. His previous work includes content marketing agency Siege Media for six years, Homebuyer.com, and The Grit Group. Outside of work, you can catch Vince running, playing with his 2 kids, enjoying some video games, or watching Phillies baseball.
Only ~1% of people click AI citations, but 75% of buyers pick whichever brand AI mentions first in a shortlist.
SEO fundamentals aren't dead, they're just ~80% of the picture now.
LLMs form answers by pulling consensus from reviews, publishers, and other brands — which is exactly what PR Read more
0 comments
Brand mentions may matter to AI visibility for a specific, technical reason — not just because "PR is generally good for you."
Core updates have gotten too tangled to fully roll back anymore, which changes how much weight you should even give them.
Programmatic SEO abuse doesn't get you nuked Read more
Pitch the shift, not the problem. An evergreen issue ("women don't understand their hormones") isn't news on its own.
Chase counterintuitive data, not confirmatory data. The "obvious" result typically doesn't work.
Write for the consumer, not the journalist. What would the target audience would Read more
SPF tells inbox providers which servers are allowed to send email on your behalf.
DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to every email you send so providers can verify it's genuinely from you.
DMARC tells providers what to do when SPF or DKIM fail.
Incorrectly set up domains can reduce open Read more
URL accessibility is the top citation factor
Ranking for query "fan-outs" (the secondary searches AI runs alongside the main query) matters more than any single keyword ranking
Matching your content's structure to the answer format correlates strongly with getting cited.
llms.txt has zero Read more
Across 106 email templates and 13 campaigns, Google, Apple, and Microsoft's AI summaries varied enormously — Microsoft Copilot's averaged 156 words, Google Gemini's just 29.
Bullet points were the single formatting technique that most influenced what AI pulled into a summary (up to 92% inclusion Read more
AI citations are wildly fragmented, and prompt type drives citation patterns more than any other domain.
Informational prompts pull nearly 3x more citations than brand awareness queries
ChatGPT cites far more sources than any Google platform.
Reddit, the most-cited site, accounted for just Read more
AI is far more likely to mention a brand than cite that brand’s website.
Only 23.1% of brand mentions include a citation, so mentions and citations should be tracked separately.
ChatGPT cites fewer URLs than Google’s AI products, but it is much more likely to name the brands it cites.
Read more
Self-promotional listicles are already getting hit. Google has changed how it ranks this content, and ChatGPT appears to be following suit.
A lot of what's "working" right now, like prompt injection widgets, paid mentions, scaled comparison pages is a liability in disguise.
E-E-A-T isn't a Read more
Link insertions are sold on just 14.9% of sites in the database. Guest posts were available on effectively all of them.
The average insertion costs $179.
97.5% of sites selling insertions are low quality.
Only 143 sites in the entire database — 0.34% — are genuinely high quality and Read more
