I ran an AEO experiment and found something critical

the median DR of websites AI cites is 86

I asked ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude the same set of questions and pulled the DR of all 1,329 sources they cited

say you ask ChatGPT “best CRM for startups”. it searches, reads a bunch of pages, cites around 7 sources and writes you an answer

you read the answer, but the AI read the blog posts first and decided who gets quoted

here’s what the cited pages have in common:

- trust
only 7% of citations came from sites under DR 30

AI quotes sites the web already trusts, and that trust is built with backlinks

- page format
73% of the sources were blog content: listicles, articles and comparisons

product and landing pages were 7%, and forums and social were only 3%

- original data
ChatGPT is the exception: only 18% of its citations were blog content, and 63% were the original source, like a pricing page or the docs

AI quotes the place a fact comes from, so if your post repeats the same stats as 40 other posts, there’s nothing in it to quote

- interactivity on the page
many cited pages had a calculator, chart, table or template

the few humans who click through already read the AI’s summary, so they click to do something, not to read

now you can’t get to DR 86 right away, but you can do 2 things:
1. get to DR 30+ in less than 5 months
2. get your product mentioned in the exact listicles AI keeps citing

Outrank helps you do both
it builds backlinks for you automatically and gets your product the #1 spot in the listicles AI cites

so after this experiment, we rebuilt all 280 posts on the Outrank blog this week. 275 of them now have a calculator, chart, checklist or template

that’s what we’re building into every Outrank article: real data, backlinks that raise your DR, and pages worth clicking

so now we write for the AI first, then give the human a reason to click