Hi Reader,

If you pay for an AI visibility tool, or you're deciding whether to buy one, my new review shows you how I turned ThriveStack CitedBy recommendations into AI search wins within 6 days, and which of its numbers you can safely put in front of your board.

In less than a month of testing ThriveStack CitedBy on my own site, Google Search Console recorded 3 wins:

• One blog post more than quadrupled its search impressions in 6 days, from 13 to 59.
• A second post jumped from roughly page 5 of Google to page 2 in 6 days (an average position of 46.8 to 18.4).
• A third page earned 3 new search results, all at position 4.

ThriveStack CitedBy picked those first two posts for me and told me how to update them… the only change behind the first win was adding a new section.

My month with CitedBy also exposed a problem that I'd been completely unaware of, and that no AI visibility tool has solved yet: Authority-borrowing.

READ THE FULL REVIEW

Disclosure: this is a paid partnership with ThriveStack CitedBy. They paid me to test CitedBy and share my results, so you can weigh everything in this email with that in mind.

What's In The Review

• The 2 CitedBy picks that gained in my Google Search Console within 6 days, and the changes behind each
• The third win, which came from a fix that no tool recommended
• How a third-party page can cite your work and still recommend someone else, with 1 beneficial example and 1 malicious example
• The 3 steps that I use in CitedBy to spot authority-borrowing, and the one fix for it that backfires
• The 5 places where CitedBy outperforms the other AI visibility tools in my stack
• 6 caveats that keep your AI visibility results honest

Referenced

• Google Search Console, the source for every gain that I credit in the review
• Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which CitedBy now connects to alongside Search Console
• Otterly.ai and Peec.ai, two providers that CitedBy's Prompt Research can import prompts from
• Model Context Protocol (MCP), which lets AI assistants work directly with your CitedBy visibility data
• NUOPTIMA's list of the best fractional CMOs for AI companies, my example of beneficial authority-borrowing
• AI citation measurement is broken, my analysis of 40 runs of the same 25 prompts against data-mania.com

Where To Find ThriveStack CitedBy

• ThriveStack CitedBy

Biggest Takeaways

1. All 3 wins came from pages that I had already published. When you answer every gap with a brand new post, you may write from scratch when an edit to an existing page would have done the job.
2. One of those 3 wins came from a fix that no tool recommended. I found the fix by reading my own most-cited article closely, and my update to that article earned 3 new search results that each point to one specific section of the page, all at position 4. Problems on your best-performing pages can stay live without an automated tool noticing them.
3. Every AI engine that drew on that rankings page got my article as a source and a list of 26 other firms as the answer. You can do the work and earn the citation, and your competitor can still end up with the recommendation.
4. I emailed the site's owner about leaving me off the list. By October 7 the page had been rewritten to 19 firms, I was still absent, and the citation to my article was gone. You can't change someone else's website, and that leaves you with only a few moves. One of those moves backfires, and the review explains why.
5. NUOPTIMA's list of the best fractional CMOs for AI companies mentions Data-Mania by name and ranks me first. You can earn the recommendation along with the mention, and in my experience so far it's the exception.
6. CitedBy turned 43 recommendations into 5 task lists, one for each role on my team. If you've ever tried to split an audit between a developer, a writer, and a PR contact, you already know that turning findings into assignments for each person is most of the work.
7. AI engines regularly quote a table from my pages as a standalone answer, and one of my recorded citations begins with a table header. If an engine is going to quote a fragment of your page, you want that fragment to make complete sense on its own.
8. AI visibility tools track citations and brand presence. A gain in AI visibility is easy to mistake for a pipeline metric, and on its own it tells you nothing about revenue.

If you pay for an AI visibility tool, or you're deciding whether to buy one, the full review shows you which of its numbers hold up in front of a client or a board.

You can start with ThriveStack CitedBy on your own domain. As a reminder, ThriveStack paid me for this campaign. If you'd like help deciding which of its recommendations to act on first, reply back and let me know. Let's map it out together.

READ THE FULL REVIEW

All the best,

Lillian Pierson

Fractional CMO & GTM Engineer