Eric Siu breaks down how to get your agency ranked in listicles that answer engines promote. Find existing lists cited by AI, create your own, then outreach to site owners using Ahrefs Brand Radar to find contact info and secure placements.
When it comes to AEO, if you want to win the top 10 here, listicle placements is number one. So listicle placements, meaning that for us, we have a digital marketing agency. So we want to appear on the top 10 digital marketing agencies, top 15 digital marketing agencies in Los Angeles. There's a lot of different permutations that we can go after. And what we've noticed with these answer engines is they'd like to go after listicles. They will often cite— when you look at it, by the way, go to Google's AI mode, for example, you see when it does a query fan out where it pulls 10 to 30 to 60 different sources. When you look at those sources, they're pulling from a lot of these different listicles. And so that means that you can, one, you can create listicles for yourself. 2, you can reach out to these other listicles. When you look at AI mode, just look at who they're listing, reach out to those people, okay? Or you can use different tools out there. We use the Ahrefs Brand Radar. You can use that and look at all the different places that are being sorted and then use AI to find the contact information for all these and just reach out to these people. That's one of the things that you can do to get listed higher when it comes to these answer engines.
