AI visibility & searchAgenticAugust 22, 2026

The Citation Map

Suggested tool: Claude (holds two conflicting lists side by side without quietly inventing a third)

The scenario

You're about to build next quarter's media list off habit, legacy relationships, and a spreadsheet somebody made in 2023. Meanwhile, your buyers are asking ChatGPT about your category and getting answers assembled from a completely different set of sources. You need to know which outlets the models actually reach for before you spend another quarter pitching the ones they ignore.

The prompt

Act as a media strategist auditing whether our earned media targets match what AI engines actually cite in our category. Below are two lists. First, the sources cited by AI answer engines across a set of real buyer questions, with the question each source appeared under. Second, our current target media list.

Build a Citation Map with five columns: (1) outlet, (2) how many of our buyer questions it was cited under, (3) whether it's currently on our target list, (4) what content format earned the citation, such as a buying guide, a ranked list, original research, or a service explainer, and (5) the single most realistic angle we could pitch that outlet given what it already gets cited for.

Then give me three lists. Outlets that earn citations and are missing from our target list, ranked by frequency. Outlets on our target list that never appeared in the citations at all. And content formats we don't currently produce that are earning citations for everyone else.

Do not pad the map with outlets that weren't in the source data. If our target list is mostly absent from the citations, say so plainly.

[PASTE CITATION SOURCES AND TARGET MEDIA LIST]

How to use it

Write down 8 to 12 real questions someone would ask an AI about your category. Not brand questions. Buyer questions. "Best project management software for nonprofits." "Is this treatment covered by insurance?" "Which firms handle this kind of case?" The things your prospects actually type.

Run every question through Perplexity, then repeat a handful in ChatGPT with search on. Copy the cited sources for each answer into a single document, and note which domains keep appearing. This takes about 20 minutes, and it's the whole ballgame.

Paste that source list into Claude alongside your current target media list, then run this:

Read the output looking for one specific thing: the gap between prestige and citation. The outlets that make your CEO happy are often not the outlets that make the model confident. Both can be true, and now you can price the difference.

Take the top five cited outlets you aren't currently working, give each one an owner and one pitch angle, and get the first outreach out this week. Rerun the map in 90 days and see what moved.

Why it works

It replaces "who do we want coverage in" with "who does the machine trust," which is a much harder question to argue with in a planning meeting.
It gives your trade pitches a real business case, so the client who dismisses the vertical outlet can see exactly what it's worth in AI answers.
It exposes the formats you aren't producing, because the citations are going to buying guides, ranked lists, and original research, not to your quarterly announcement.

Cowork version

For Claude Cowork, where the prompt can read the files in a folder.

Build a Citation Map from the files in this folder and save the outputs here.

1. Read my buyer questions file. For each question, search the web and capture which sources are cited or surfaced as authoritative. Record the outlet, the URL, and the page format, such as a buying guide, ranked list, original research, or service explainer.

2. Read my target media list and normalize it to domains so it can be compared against the citation data.

3. Build the Citation Map: outlet, citation frequency across my questions, whether it's on my target list, the format that earned the citation, and the single most realistic pitch angle given what that outlet already gets cited for.

4. Produce three gap lists. Cited outlets missing from my target list, ranked by frequency. Target list outlets that never appeared in any citation. And content formats that earn citations I don't currently produce. Do not add outlets that weren't in the captured data.

5. If a coverage archive is present, compare where we actually earned placements over the last two quarters against where the citations go, and tell me what percentage of our earned coverage sits in outlets the models never cite.

6. Save the map as Citation Map.xlsx and save a one-page brief as Citation Map - Pitch Brief.md covering the top five uncovered outlets with owner, angle, and format.

This prompt first ran in TIC. Read the original issue →