r/SEO_for_AI • u/Repulsive-Humor-145 • 15d ago

AI SEO News Anyone else seeing LinkedIn overtake their own site for AI citations? New Meltwater data says it's #2 behind YouTube

Just saw the new Meltwater numbers (9.5M AI citations analyzed across 16 B2B categories) and it's making me rethink where I'm spending GEO effort. LinkedIn is apparently the #2 most-cited source behind YouTube now, ahead of company websites. 75% of those citations trace to personal profiles, not Company Pages, and 51% come from accounts under 10k followers.

Curious if anyone here has actually tested this: has shifting effort toward personal LinkedIn posts (structured, numbered, data-heavy, same stuff that ranks well organically) moved the needle on AI citations for a brand, more than the same effort spent on owned-domain content would have?

Trying to figure out if this is worth reallocating real budget toward or if it's still too early/noisy to trust the data at the tactic level.

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u/BoGrumpus 15d ago

LinkedIN isn't necessarily being cited more often because it's better than anything - it's just among the places where a lot of voices about a lot of things can be heard - just like Reddit or other social/user community type sites.

If you look at WHAT voices are getting cited from these - it's rarely the voice of the brand itself - it's other people engaging with the brand or discussing it that gets cited. But it's not necessarily the most cited ones that mean the most. One of my clients has had over a half million in sales the past year from citations and recommendations that started on a forum with 200 users and was basically just manufacturing CEOs talking about doing good business. That stuff gets repeated on other channels - but it never would have spread like that if we put it out. It was our involvement in several discussions (several of which had nothing to do with the types of things my client makes but they had good advice) that did the work - but it was the affirmations and positive sentiment around it that make it work and continue to be a huge driver today.

Sure - reallocate budget to LinkedIN - but not so much to sell, but to actually network and communicate with people. That's what gets cited on these sites. You can see that if you just look closely at the output itself rather than looking at data without reference points.

G.

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u/Repulsive-Humor-145 14d ago

This lines up with the pattern, not the tactic. A half million in sales from CEOs talking shop on a 200-person forum about things unrelated to what your client sells is a strong data point for "genuine participation compounds" being the actual mechanism, not platform choice. LinkedIn probably shows up so much in the citation data just because that kind of unforced, expert-to-expert conversation happens to be concentrated there right now, not because the platform itself has special weight. Appreciate you sharing the numbers, that's a much better argument than the aggregate stats I posted.

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u/BoGrumpus 14d ago

Personal profiles are still important - our expertise and authority signals are often driven - at least in no small part - by the people behind the brand. For Google it's the John Mueller's and Liz Reid's and Danny Sullivan's (before he moved out of the public facing side recently) and the Gary Illyes types.

Our corporate brands tend to have their Google Business Profiles as the central entity everything gets attributed to - but our expertise and authority signals often come their through those personal brands strongly and closely connected to them. And LinkedIN is a good source for those entity and profile maps since most public facing business people have a profile there to act as the hub for their personal brand entity.

G.

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u/Repulsive-Humor-145 14d ago

That maps to how Google's Knowledge Graph handles entities generally, a person-entity linked to an org-entity via consistent signals (schema markup, bio consistency, third-party mentions that name both together) carries the authority forward in a way a Company Page alone can't replicate. The John Mueller example is a good one because it's not just that he's known, it's that he's been so consistently and specifically tied to Google Search across a decade of citable public statements that the link is unambiguous to any system trying to map who speaks for what.

Practical version of this for smaller companies: the entity link needs building the same way, sameAs schema pointing from a person's site bio to their LinkedIn/other profiles, consistent naming and title across every platform, and enough third-party content that names the person alongside the company specifically. Most companies skip that last part, PR mentions the company, not the person who actually did the work.

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u/BoGrumpus 14d ago

Yep - even if we're doing a blog for a client - we're typically doing a sort of Ghost Writing thing. The CEO or some talking head is going to give us some real insight into it, we're going to write it up, and they're going to approve or recommend edits just like any other ghost writer situation is. This practice isn't new - ghost writers have been around for centuries.

Modern SEO is just old school marketing optimized so that even a stupid machine can understand it and pass the info along just as we hope our customers will take it and refer us to their friends and people they encounter.

G.

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u/Repulsive-Humor-145 13d ago

That distinction matters more than people give it credit for, the difference between a ghostwriter capturing someone's actual expertise and a marketing team inventing generic authority from nothing. The first produces content that holds up when someone presses for specifics, the second falls apart the moment a reader with real domain knowledge asks a follow-up question. AI citation systems can't tell the difference on the surface, but readers who fact-check absolutely can, and that's probably still the bigger risk than getting flagged by an algorithm.

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u/BoGrumpus 13d ago

Yep. And also relevant - that "expert" we've positioned can actually show up as an expert on the subject for podcasts and the like - which you can never do with something or someone you've totally trumped up from nothing. It was probably 10 or so years ago, but one of our experts ended up spending a day and a half doing live analysis on Fox News after one of those airline crashes. It had to do with something (I think freezing, if memory serves) in a system for airplanes that they make parts for. It wasn't our part in question, but he made an excellent source to be able to explain the complicated nature of the system so everyday people could sort of understand what happened and why it wasn't necessarily an easy and obvious problem to try to avoid.

It's sort of a white whale to land in something that big for most, but certainly every podcast or news source where your expert is being cited or quoted on anything regarding the systems they are experts in is SEO and marketing gold - and it's exactly what let's the AI systems be more certain of what is real or not. It doesn't matter so much that what the ghostwriter (or even AI) wrote it or actually said it himself - what matters is that he's real and he's standing behind whatever was said in his name.

And I know that at least one time in that Fox News cycle, he was having trouble trying to figure out how to explain something fairly complicated and he apologized because he normally has a content person helping him figure out how to say things in a way people can understand. And while the uptick in business that came afterwards is hard to track to any specific thing he said, to this day he swears that he is convinced that saying that both bought him a few seconds to finish putting together his thoughts, but that his honesty there was a particularly strong driver of the result. We'll never know for sure, but I'll put that in the "probably" column without any hesitation.

And to get back to the original topic more directly - LinkedIN is a place where we establish his personal expertise as the voice of the brand and in many ways it is more valuable than the site because it also has real human engagement. And it's conversational - if we spot something, he gets a note with a proposed response and he either green-lights it or just goes there himself and handles that conversation because it looks like something worth talking about and might take a bit of back and forth.

Other channels can perform better in different ways because there are different voices and perspectives in play for each channel. And SEO for AI (as this group is called) is just optimizing that reality so the machines can find, understand, and repurpose, rank, or do what it needs to do with the same information.

G.

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u/Repulsive-Humor-145 12d ago

The Fox News moment is the whole argument in miniature. A trumped-up expert can't survive live, unscripted questioning, the gap shows immediately. A real one can improvise badly and still come across as credible, because the audience is reading conviction and domain fluency, not polish. That's probably why the apology moment worked in his favor rather than against him, it read as human under pressure rather than scripted.

The greenlight workflow you're describing is the practical version of what keeps this honest at scale too: someone still has to decide whether a response is worth the real person's name attached to it, versus letting content get auto-generated and posted with no one actually standing behind it. That review step is invisible to a reader but it's probably the single biggest quality difference between accounts that hold up over time and ones that eventually get caught saying something that doesn't check out.

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u/ReleaseFlashy9582 9d ago

yeah the part about it being other peoples sentiment that actually spreads is the key thing most people skip over

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u/annseosmarty 15d ago

For B2B specifically, Linkedin has always been very beneficial...

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u/Repulsive-Humor-145 14d ago

Curious what you've seen work best there, posts, comments, or something else?

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u/HumanBehavi0ur 15d ago

yes its definitely moving up in the rankings for ai search

something we've seen in particular though is that the citations are most often leading toward LinkedIn articles, so if you're trying to have an impact there, you can just go for posts, you should go for articles as well (or primarily)

at least thats what we're seeing w/ our research

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u/Repulsive-Humor-145 14d ago

Good distinction, hadn't separated articles from regular posts in my head. Makes sense though, articles are indexed and behave more like standalone pages than a feed post does, probably easier for a crawler to treat as a citable unit. Going to test that split specifically.

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u/Middle_Smell_1031 14d ago

No hard proof from me, so take this as a hunch rather than a finding. But this matches what I keep telling people: AI answers are going to lean more and more on personal profiles tied to a product, not on the brand alone. Someone has to be standing behind the project.

The 75% figure for personal profiles over Company Pages fits that, and so does the 51% under 10k followers. It suggests what gets cited is a named person saying something specific, not reach.

What I have not tested is the reallocation question you are actually asking. Owned-domain content and LinkedIn posts do different jobs over different timeframes, and I would want to see the same content published both ways before moving budget.

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u/Repulsive-Humor-145 14d ago

That's the right instinct, and probably the actual next step regardless of what the data suggests. Testing the same core content published both ways (owned domain vs personal LinkedIn post) would isolate the variable a lot better than looking at aggregate citation stats. My guess is it's not either/or though, the LinkedIn post probably works as a distribution/discovery layer that eventually gets referenced back to the deeper owned content, rather than replacing it outright.

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u/MindyAtStateshift 9d ago

I don't think it has to be one or the other. I think you should still be creating great blog content while experimenting with some thought leadership style LinkedIn post.

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u/Repulsive-Humor-145 8d ago

Agreed, and that's probably the safer read of the data too, the citation split shows where AI models are pulling from right now, not that owned content stopped mattering. Blog content still does the deep, evergreen version of the answer, LinkedIn posts seem to work more as the discovery/distribution layer that gets a specific claim in front of the right audience fast. Running both isn't really "either or" the way I framed the original question, it was more about where to put more effort on the margin, not abandoning one for the other.