A new journalist arrives in your city and needs a story about your industry by tomorrow. They do not walk the streets. They call the three people everyone calls, read the two trade publications everyone reads, and check the forum where practitioners argue.
Being excellent and unknown to those five sources means you are not in the story. Not because anyone judged you — because you were not where they looked.
The concentration is real, the numbers are not settled
Multiple independent trackers agree on the shape: citations cluster heavily into a small set of domains, and the same names appear in every study — Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn, major review platforms, and a handful of large publishers.
They disagree substantially on the magnitudes. One 2026 aggregate index puts Reddit at around 40% of multi-engine citation frequency; another study reports YouTube overtaking Reddit in the same period; a third reports Wikipedia at 47.9% of ChatGPT citations. TIER B These cannot all be right, and the variation tells you something more useful than any of the individual figures:
Citation sources are volatile. They shift with model updates, with content-licensing deals, with product changes, and with the mix of queries a given study happened to run. Any number you are quoted about "the most-cited domain" is a photograph of a moving object.
Plan for the durable pattern — a few large platforms dominate, and they are the ones where people discuss things publicly — and never build a strategy that depends on one platform's share holding.
What to actually do on each
Reddit and specialist forums
The most-cited and the most dangerous. Reddit communities detect and punish marketing with unusual speed, and a ban is permanent and public. The only approach that works:
- Participate as a named human with an occupation, not as a company account.
- Answer questions in your area of genuine expertise, thoroughly, with no link.
- Disclose your affiliation plainly when it is relevant. "I run a forwarding agent in Klang, so take this with that in mind" earns credibility rather than costing it.
- Never post a promotional thread. Never use multiple accounts. Never pay someone to mention you.
This is slow and it is not delegable to an agency. It is also the highest-trust surface on the internet right now, precisely because it is hard to fake.
YouTube
Given the strength of the correlation reported for YouTube mentions, and given that engines read titles, descriptions and transcripts, this is the most under-exploited channel for most B2B and service businesses. Note what is being measured: your brand name appearing in video text. That includes videos other people make. Practical moves:
- Answer your ten most common customer questions as ten plain videos. A phone and good light is enough.
- Write real descriptions — several hundred words that restate the answer in text, because the description is retrievable content.
- Upload accurate transcripts rather than relying on auto-captions.
- Get yourself onto other people's channels: interviews, panels, industry podcasts that publish to YouTube.
Review and comparison platforms
For B2B software, G2 and Capterra. For services, Google reviews plus whatever vertical directory your buyers use. The mechanism is straightforward: these are the only sources with structured, current, category-organised third-party data about vendors, which makes them ideal retrieval targets for "best X for Y" questions.
- Claim the profile and complete every field, especially category placement.
- Build a steady, honest flow of reviews rather than a burst. Bursts look manufactured to platforms and to readers.
- Respond to reviews, including bad ones. Responses are text on a trusted domain that mentions your brand.
Wikipedia and Wikidata
Covered in Chapter 11. Wikidata is achievable and worth doing. Wikipedia is not something you buy.
A consistently cited domain and one of the few where you fully control the content. A complete company page, employees with matching profiles, and regular substantive posts from named people all contribute mentions on a high-trust domain.
Run your five most important buyer questions through Perplexity — it shows sources most clearly — and write down every domain cited across all five. That list is your target platform list, specific to your industry, and it beats any generic ranking including the ones in this chapter. Do it again in three months and watch it move.
Pick the one platform where your buyers genuinely discuss their problems, and spend thirty minutes a week there being useful under your own name. One year of that beats any campaign you can buy.