Get cited and credited when AI answers with your content.
AI engines like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini and Claude now answer many of the questions readers used to click through to media sites for, often by summarizing publishers’ own reporting and content. That makes AI search the biggest threat to publisher traffic, and also a small but valuable channel of high-intent readers. Stellar AEO Labs helps publishers and media companies protect their visibility as search changes: becoming the sources AI cites and links, getting their journalists, experts and brand recognized as authorities, and capturing the readers AI answers do send.
A structured, end-to-end AI search optimization program for publishers that starts with how your content and brand appear in AI answers today, measures how often you are cited, credited and linked compared with competing outlets, identifies what is driving that across your site and the wider web, and turns the findings into a prioritized plan your editorial, audience, product and engineering teams can act on.
We build a prompt set around how your audience uses AI in your coverage areas: asking which publications to read, writers to follow, and asking the questions your content answers, from news and analysis to how-tos, reviews and recommendations. We then benchmark how often AI names, cites and links you, and which outlets and platforms it uses instead.
We assess your site, page templates and off-site footprint across Stellar’s 5 AEO pillars using a rubric built specifically for publishers, evaluate competitors along the same criteria, and prioritize the highest-impact opportunities by expected citation impact and effort into a roadmap divided into editorial, marketing and engineering tasks.
We work with your teams on a content strategy focused on the original work AI can’t commoditize, and make that content easy for AI to extract and attribute without changing how it reads for your audience: crawlable summaries of key pieces, literal descriptions of your brand, sections and writers and who they are for, structured data, crawler access, and, where relevant, how much of paywalled content AI can see.
We identify the sources AI relies on in your space, from Reddit, YouTube and Wikipedia to social, then build a plan to strengthen your writers’ and brand’s presence there. We also help shape your AI licensing strategy: which platforms and crawlers to allow, license or block.
We re-run the benchmark, track changes in citations, attribution, AI referral traffic and how AI describes your brand, and refine the roadmap as your coverage, competitors, licensing agreements and AI models change.
AI engines draw on publishers’ content for answers every day, but they treat widely covered news and generic content as interchangeable. They cite, credit and link the sources they can access, understand and trust, and that offer something others don’t. Publishers lose visibility when their original work is hard to extract or attribute, or when AI doesn’t recognize their brand and expertise.
| AI engines need to understand… | Publishers often lose visibility when… |
|---|---|
| Original contribution: the reporting, data, analysis or testing only you have, and the key takeaway of each piece. | The key insight is buried in narrative copy, so AI cites an aggregator or rewrite that states it more plainly. |
| Authorship & expertise: who wrote each piece, their beat, credentials and track record on the topic. | Author pages are thin or missing from structured data, so AI can’t connect journalists and experts to their subjects. |
| Brand & coverage: what your publication is, what each section covers, and who it is for. | About and section pages lack literal descriptions, so AI can’t match the brand to the readers asking for it. |
| Access & extraction: the content of each piece, including articles, video and paywalled stories, in text crawlers can read. | Key details sit in scripts, embeds, images or behind paywalls with no crawlable summary, so AI has little to cite. |
| Freshness & accuracy: when a piece was published and updated, corrections, and whether evergreen content is still current. | Dates are missing or inconsistent, or outdated details like former writers persist, so AI repeats stale facts. |
| Third-party footprint: references to your work and writers on Reddit, YouTube, directories, “best of” lists and other outlets. | Outlets that pick up your work don’t credit or link you, or you’re missing from the lists AI uses to recommend sources. |
How publishers can stay visible, cited and credited as more readers get their answers from AI.
For most brands, AI answers are a new place to be recommended. For publishers, they are also a substitute for the visit itself: AI engines summarize the reporting, reviews, guides and explainers publishers create, often without a click. That puts referral traffic, and the advertising, affiliate and subscription revenue built on it, under direct pressure. And when many outlets cover the same story or topic, AI treats them as interchangeable, so only original reporting, analysis and expertise reliably earn a citation. At the same time, readers who do click through from AI answers tend to be highly engaged, so being the source AI cites and links matters more than ever.
AEO can’t bring back every click that AI answers absorb, but it determines whether your work is credited when AI uses it, and whether you are the outlet those readers find. Stellar helps publishers measure how often they are cited, credited and linked, and focus on the content and signals that win those citations.
AI engines retrieve a handful of sources for each question and cite the ones that answer it most clearly and credibly. They favor content that states its key facts and conclusions explicitly, comes from authors and outlets they recognize as authorities on the topic, is accessible to their crawlers, and is current. When several sites cover the same story or topic, the clearest and most trusted version tends to be cited, which is not always the original. When people ask which publications, newsletters or writers to follow, AI also leans heavily on Reddit, directories and “best of” lists.
Stellar’s five-pillar framework assesses each of these signals across your templates and content types.
It depends on your business model and licensing position, and it is rarely a simple yes or no. Some AI crawlers, such as GPTBot and ClaudeBot, collect content to train models, while others, such as OAI-SearchBot and Claude-SearchBot, retrieve pages in real time to answer questions and can send readers back to you. Many publishers treat them differently, and some open a selected subset of content while protecting the rest. Blocking everything can remove you from AI answers entirely, while aggregators and competitors that retell your stories are cited instead.
Stellar helps you weigh these trade-offs to formulate a licensing strategy, audit how each AI crawler sees your site today, and set access rules that match the strategy.
Partly, depending on the content. Narrative and reported stories shouldn’t be rewritten into bullet points, which would hurt the reading experience and your brand. For those, most AEO work happens where readers don’t see it, such as crawlable summaries, structured data and author and topic pages, plus habits like stating the main finding clearly near the top. For service content such as guides, how-tos, reviews and comparisons, the formats AI favors, like step-by-step lists, comparison tables and FAQs, often serve readers better too.
Your content strategy and what you write about should also be reviewed as part of your AEO strategy. AI can already summarize generic, widely covered information, but it can’t produce first-hand testing, real experience, original reporting or expert opinion. Publishers that prioritize that kind of content give AI a reason to cite them.
Yes. AI engines can only cite what they can access, so the goal is to decide deliberately what they see. Many publishers expose a crawlable summary of what each piece covers, the people and companies involved and why it matters, while keeping the full analysis for subscribers, and open selected foundational pieces in full so AI absorbs their perspective. Readers who arrive from AI answers tend to be high-intent, which makes them valuable subscription prospects.
No. Licensing agreements can give AI companies access to your content and provide revenue, but they do not guarantee that your content is cited, credited or linked in a given answer. Citation still depends on clarity, authority, accessibility and recency. AEO helps you get the most visibility from the access you grant, whether or not you have a licensing deal.
Beyond search traffic, publishers should track how often their content is cited and linked in AI answers on their key topics, how often their brand and journalists are named, how accurately their work is represented, and the volume and conversion of referral traffic from AI platforms. Much of that traffic is unattributed, since Google doesn’t separate AI Overviews and AI Mode clicks from organic search and many AI-driven visits arrive as direct traffic, so analytics understate AI’s real impact.
Stellar sets up a benchmark across these measures and re-runs it at regular intervals, so you can see which changes are moving citations and readers.
To get started with optimizing your website for AI search visibility, submit your information here. Stellar will perform a mini-assessment to give you a AEO-readiness score along the different pillars of our framework. Your free report will be emailed to you within 2–3 business days.
Your request has been received. Your AEO score will be emailed to you within 2–3 business days.
