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Technical issues are typically anything a web developer would handle (i.e., code). Content issues are anything a non-coder could fix (i.e., creative).

Both are crucial to AI search performance.

We recommend tackling technical issues first for one simple reason: It doesn’t matter how good your content is if LLMs can’t access and use it.

Before you start prioritizing what needs to be updated and when, start here: Make sure your website is not blocking AI traffic. You’d be surprised just how often this happens.

Once you’ve triple-checked that your robots.txt is in good working order, you’ll want to chunk out your technical optimization efforts. There are multiple ways to do this (and all of them are better than picking URLs out of a hat).

1. Agent traffic

One option is to prioritize next steps based on bot traffic volume.

Log in to your AI search product to see which pages are crawled most frequently by AI agents—these are the ones that AI platforms are likely pulling from (or at least trying to pull from) most in prompt responses.

2. Citations

Another option is reviewing citations in your AI search product to see which URLs are getting the most love from LLMs.

For example, in Scrunch you do this by going to Citations → Add filter → Citation owner → Brand.

From here you can click into your domain to see a list of the most popular pages with LLMs in descending order, including each page’s Influence Score (i.e., the percentage of responses that have cited the source multiplied by the unique number of prompts).

3. Site mapping

Our vote is to use a method unique to Scrunch: site mapping.

Site mapping is exactly what it sounds like: mapping out the various pages on your website to get a high-level snapshot of performance. This includes page quality, agent traffic, citations, and AI referrals.

Scrunch automatically assigns an Audit Score to each page based on page content, structure, and links.

Together with visibility into how often the page is being crawled by bots, cited in AI responses, and sending traffic to your site, you can easily pinpoint which pages are most in need of some TLC.

🔌 Shameless plug: Scrunch’s Site Maps feature also provides page diagnostics (e.g., access checks that show you whether different AI platforms are able to access the page), as well as visibility into prompts that should cite the page in question but currently don’t.

How do I prioritize content updates?

When you think of content updates, you probably think of creating net new content. But that's not always the most impactful place to start.

That goes double if you're planning to fill in gaps with low-quality AI-generated content (aka slop). Churning out AI-authored content might give you some short-term visibility gains, but over time, AI platforms are likely to reward high-quality, human-written (or at least human-edited) content.

Research shows that AI-generated content leads to model collapse. Garbage in equals garbage out.

The companies behind the models aren’t big fans of that. Meaning they’ll likely reward original, expert-written content in the long run.

So where do you start? There are multiple signals that can help with content prioritization:

1. Competitive landscape: Prompts where competitors show up and you don't

The most urgent opportunities are prompts where AI mentions competitors but leaves you out of the response entirely. Identify them and figure out if you need to optimize existing content or create something new to answer the prompt better.

2. Content gaps: Topics where you’re missing content coverage

These are content blind spots—topics relevant to your business where your brand has little or no presence in related prompts due to missing content. Learn which topics you’re content-light on and fill in the gaps, either by beefing up existing content or starting from scratch.

🔌 Another shameless plug: Scrunch’s Content Gaps feature auto-detects when your site is missing content for tracked prompts and surfaces opportunities, flagged by urgency and filterable by topic and persona.

3. Brand protection: Responses and citations with negative sentiment

Keep an eye out for prompts where your brand is mentioned but in a negative or inaccurate context. These are worth addressing quickly—both by improving the source content and by making sure AI has access to more authoritative pages on your site that tell a better story.

🔌 Another shameless plug: Scrunch’s Sentiment Trends feature highlights which topics and personas are driving big shifts in sentiment for your brand over time, both positive and negative.

In general we recommend starting with the content already on your site and using citations as a guide. Citations are a map to the sources LLMs already know and trust.

Keep in mind that the pages most frequently crawled by AI agents and the ones getting the most organic SEO traffic (there’s a good chance that they’re the same pages) also give you a solid starting point for improving existing content versus starting from a blank page.

Identifying and enhancing pages that AI platforms already see as somewhat authoritative is going to yield faster results than creating net new content.

1. 3rd-party citations

There are two kinds of third-party citations to go after: ones that don’t feature competitors and ones that do.

The former are an untapped way to show up in AI search results.

If you want to get your brand mentioned, you can reach out to third-party sources to get a placement (this is easier to do if the source in question is a listicle or if you can add productive insights to the content).

The latter—third-party citations that mention competitors—work the same way.

If a third-party source is willing to mention a competitor, there’s a decent likelihood that they’ll do the same for you. Use the same approach as above to get listed.

Another option is to create your own content to better address the prompt in question. This tactic is definitely more time-intensive, but, if successful, you’ll get a new citation as well as a mention.

If the page currently being cited is substance-light or there’s an obvious discrepancy between the title of the page and the actual content, it may be possible to beat it for the citation fairly easily.

2. Competitor citations

There’s an almost-zero chance that a competitor will mention and backlink your brand if they’re a cited source (at least not in any positive way).

In cases like these, creating your own content is likely the best bet. It’s simply a matter of determining how well your competitor answers the prompt and weighing whether devoting the time and resources is worth it for the prompt in question.

In other words: You don’t necessarily need to sweat prompts that are only tangentially related to your brand or seem like they may not be getting a ton of volume.

3. Brand citations

Congrats! You’re already a cited source. Now it’s worth evaluating the content and finding ways to optimize it further to hang on to your citation.

Balancing source placement vs. replacement

For every citation opportunity you uncover, you're really making one of two calls: Pursue a placement in the source AI is already citing or create content good enough to displace it.

We touched on it up above, but it’s worth digging a little deeper into how to think through your decision:

Pursue a placement when:

• A trusted third-party domain shows up consistently across many of your tracked prompts. These sources have already earned AI's trust—getting mentioned there is often faster and more durable than trying to outrank them.

Improve or create your own content when:

• A competitor's page is the cited source. It’s incredibly unlikely that they’ll mention you favorably, so your only move is to build something better and displace them.
• The cited source content is thin or poorly optimized. Think titles that promise more than the page delivers or content with clear structural gaps.

If you do decide to invest in your own content, start with pages AI already knows about. A page with high agent traffic but low citations is a signal that AI is visiting but not citing—often fixable with content quality improvements rather than a full rebuild.

Go net new when no existing page on your site addresses the prompt. In that case, create focused content built specifically around that prompt—not a general page you hope AI will connect the dots on.

Balancing volume vs. intent

When building your citation strategy, you’ll want to focus on the citation sources that will have the biggest impact.

Sources like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia probably come to mind. They’re often highlighted as among the “most-cited sources” for LLMs.

There’s definitely volume there at the top of the funnel (think high-level educational prompts like, “What is a CRM?”). But just because a prompt might see a lot of volume doesn’t mean it will lead to conversions.

In fact, we’ve found that the further down the funnel you go, the more likely LLMs are to cite more niche websites.

With that in mind, we recommend striking a balance between volume and purchase intent (i.e., how likely someone is to use a prompt vs. whether that prompt indicates likelihood to buy).

These types of prompts usually land at the evaluation or comparison stages of the funnel (get a quick refresher in the Prompt Tracking Framework section in chapter 2). Think prompts like:

• “What are the key features of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for enterprise companies?”
• “What do customers say about Zoho implementation?”
• “Compare Salesforce vs. HubSpot for a mid-sized B2B SaaS company - which has better support options?"
• "I'm deciding between Monday.com and Copper CRM for a Google Workspace-based team. Which integrates better?"

🔌 Another shameless plug: Scrunch makes it easy to filter prompts by funnel stage, along with persona, region, and custom tags.

Once you’ve got a handle on which later-funnel-stage prompts make sense for your brand, you can prioritize citations based on which sources are most often cited for the prompts in question.

Get mentioned by the source or beat them for the citation. Wash, rinse, repeat.

How do I scale my AI citation strategy?

If you’re feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of increasing citations by hand, there are purpose-built tools to help. We won’t name them all, but here are a couple we work with to give you an idea:

Noble

Noble automates outreach, negotiation, and payment to help get you mentioned in publications and forums that are being cited by LLMs. This helps take a lot of the grunt work out of “citation outbound."

Stacker

Stacker automates the process of getting native, non-sponsored placements in various publications. Data shows that content picked up by multiple news outlets can increase AI citation rate by up to 325%. It can also extend the half-life of AI citations.

And that’s all she wrote for chapter 3. In chapter 4, we’ll cover how to make updates and deliver content directly to LLMs to maximize optimization efforts.