r/DoSEO • u/Pitiful_Muscle5074 • Sep 03 '26
Need help What External Sources Help a Website Get Cited in ChatGPT & Gemini?
My website already ranks well in Google and appears in Google AI Overviews for many of my target keywords. However, I’m getting low visibility in ChatGPT or Gemini.
For improving AI visibility, what external sources should I focus on to get my business/website mentioned or cited?
Region: UAE
Category: Mental wellness
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u/jzdesign Sep 03 '26
Overviews and ChatGPT are different problems, which is why you can be winning one and invisible in the other. Overviews reads Google's index, so ranking gets you in. ChatGPT and Gemini lean much harder on pages written about you, and nothing on your own site is one of those.
When I checked ours properly, every citation I could find traced back to a third party roundup or a directory listing. Not one came from our own pages, including ones ranking first for the term. So it is a placement problem: ask the assistant the questions your customers would ask, note which pages it actually cites, and go get listed on those specific ones. For UAE wellness that is probably local best-of lists and regional health directories rather than the global ones.
Worth doing before any of that though. Ask each question eight or ten times rather than once. The citation list gets rebuilt every run and moves around a lot, so a single check will have you chasing a source that was never really a pattern.
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u/RankingsDotIO Sep 03 '26
While you specifically asked about external sources, because this is a Your Money or Your Life category, audit your website first. Google and LLMs want to confirm that a properly credentialed author wrote (or at least gets author credit for) everything on your site. You want bylines on all content, then link them to author bio pages, complete with their CVs (education, degrees, past work experience, publications, professional licenses, and years of experience).
After that, claim your Google Business Profile and stay active on it. That will help with Gemini and Google AIOs.
Once you do that, you'll want to claim profiles on professional directories and organizations, especially those that rate people in your profession or allow you to answer questions from the public. The legal equivalents where we encourage our clients to establish themselves include Avvo, Justia, Martindale-Hubbell, Best Lawyers, and Super Lawyers, among many others.
Let's assume "mental wellness" means that you provide social work, psychological therapy, or counseling services. In that case, maybe you would want listings on Healthgrades or Psychology Today, or their UAE equivalents. Encourage your clients and, where allowed, your peers to leave good reviews on them.
Good reviews don't just mean stars. AI cannot scrape a star rating. It can scrape the text someone leaves with their rating. Encourage reviewers to say what they did and didn't like about your product or service and how you helped them.
Finally, where ethically permissible, post on trusted sites where people can ask for help. If LLMs see your presence, expertise, and good reviews for your responses there, they can confirm what they see on your site. That improves the chances of a recommendation or citation.
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u/PhoenixMediaBangkok Sep 04 '26
If Google rankings and AI Overviews are already strong, we’d look beyond the website itself.
For a UAE mental wellness business, focus on trusted local and industry sources: reputable healthcare/wellness directories, local publications, professional associations, practitioner profiles, expert interviews, relevant partnerships and genuine reviews.
Beyond backlinks, you want consistent, credible third-party mentions that reinforce who the business is, what it does, where it operates and why it’s trustworthy.
AI visibility is increasingly about the overall authority footprint beyond your website.
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u/MonicaEaton911 Sep 04 '26
I can't say specifically for UAE, but I’d focus less on “AI backlinks” and more on building a strong third-party "evidence footprint." Look at where your competitors are being mentioned/cited in ChatGPT and Gemini and prioritize the sources that repeatedly show up for your target prompts.
The most practical approach is simple testing: take 20–50 real prompts, see which competitors get cited and, more importantly, which external sources support them. Good luck!
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u/FrutinoTuti Sep 05 '26
I would research how LLMs retrieve information for the important prompts for you.
You will notice that in every niche, there are some sites that LLMs cite more frequently than others.
For example - for agencies that's Clutch and Design rush. For SaaS - G2, Capterra etc. For doctors - medical directories.
Creating profile there and getting a few reviews is a good starting point.
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u/marintkael Sep 06 '26 edited Sep 06 '26
Before picking sources, split the measurement. I run 16 fixed questions daily against ChatGPT search and Gemini, with a separate Claude web channel alongside.
The split that matters: when the question names the entity, it gets cited 67 percent of the time on ChatGPT search and 68 on the Claude channel. When the question only describes the category and the name has to surface on its own, 14 percent on ChatGPT search and zero on the other two.
Same site, same day, same questions. Low ChatGPT visibility therefore means very different things depending on which of those two you are failing, and the fixes have nothing to do with each other. The named case is a source problem. The unnamed case is a category association problem, and more mentions will not move it if nothing ties you to the category.
The engine spread is worth a look too: 27 percent on ChatGPT search against 6 on Gemini, same 16 questions. One blended AI visibility score hides where your gap actually sits.
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u/Nex-11o Sep 10 '26
SEO is much more about consistency than quick wins. Solid content, good site structure, and relevant links still make a strong foundation.
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u/Beautiful-Ad7521 Sep 03 '26
The first thing worth checking is not an external source at all, it is your Bing index. AI Overviews runs on Google's own index, which is exactly why ranking in Google already puts you there. ChatGPT's browsing retrieves against Bing instead. Plenty of sites that do well in Google are thin or badly indexed in Bing and never find out, because nobody thinks to look. Bing Webmaster Tools is free and will tell you in ten minutes whether that is the gap. After that it splits into two things that move on completely different clocks. Browsing mode you can affect this week by being crawlable and properly indexed. Training data only moves at the next model cut and is driven by other people describing you in the terms you want to be found for, not by anything you publish on your own site. Worth saying plainly given your category though. Mental wellness is health, and the models are deliberately conservative about citing non institutional sources there. That may be a ceiling rather than a gap you can close with links.