Artem Fedorovich

quick one for anyone doing SEO or growth for clients.

i mean the grind of getting placed in listicles, roundups and comparison pages. finding the pages, digging up who maintains each one, personalized pitches, follow ups, tracking who answered and who actually placed you.

asking because clients started raising the "why doesnt ChatGPT mention us" question, and the answer mostly runs through exactly these pages. AI answers cite listicles and roundups far more than homepages.

so whats your stack? one tool that covers the whole flow, a mix of prospecting and email tools, or a spreadsheet you keep alive by hand? curious what holds up at real volume, hundreds of targets, not ten.

Go ask it for the best tool in your category. If you're not in the answer the reason is likely not your product.

Surfer put out a study in September. They went through 289,105 pages that AI answers cite. The more of those pages mention a brand the higher it sits in the answer. ChatGPT showed this the strongest. And the mentions that count most are in regular blog posts even though blogs are under a third of what gets cited.

before my last launch i read all the standard advice. post consistently, be everywhere, announce loudly, batch your content. i did a bunch of it and it mostly did nothing.

what actually moved the needle was embarrassingly small. a handful of real conversations. one question i asked in a forum out of curiosity brought more of the right people than every announcement post combined. i wasnt even promoting, i was asking about a problem, and the people who had that problem showed up on their own.

which leaves me with a weird conclusion i dont fully trust yet: the loud, scalable stuff performed worst and the slow, unscalable stuff performed best. maybe thats just my niche, or my sample size of one.

so im curious about your data points. whats a distribution move that worked way better than it had any right to? and whats the standard advice that did nothing for you?