Your brand can rank in Google yet never appear in the sources an AI answer cites. That gap is the starting point of a citation audit, according to Gintare Rimolaityte, Chief Commercial Officer at Trendos, who laid out the method in a recent Search Engine Journal webinar.

The point is not to abandon SEO, Rimolaityte stressed. It is to stop treating search rankings as a complete picture of AI visibility.

Start with the citation map

A page of search results is easy to scan. An AI answer's sources often require an extra click to inspect. Monitoring whether your brand appears in the answer is useful, but it does not reveal which sources informed the response.

Inspecting those sources surfaces a different set of decisions: improve owned content, build a presence on review sites, contribute to community discussions, or pursue editorial coverage.

In Trendos' summer 2026 examples across consumer products and retail, IT and solution services, and communication services, community and user-generated sources were prominent in all three industries. The rest of the mix varied — which makes a universal target list a poor substitute for examining your own category. Rimolaityte repeatedly encouraged attendees to check their own brands, competitors, and industries.

Industry patterns differ

The comparisons showed why the same budget should not go to the same activities for every business:

• Consumer products and retail: Brand and retail-owned sources played a substantial role alongside communities. Rimolaityte pointed to clearly organized product information — names, descriptions, specifications — as a model for making facts easy to retrieve.
• IT and solution services: Review sites, editorial sources, and community content featured prominently. Her examples included G2, Reddit, YouTube, and technology publications, making external evidence a complement to a vendor's own claims.
• Communication services: Community content and independent editorial sources mattered most, suggesting work beyond owned pages.

Rimolaityte partly attributed the retail pattern to content structure: product pages make specific facts easy to locate. For other businesses, she recommended clear question-and-answer content rather than forcing every page to resemble an ecommerce listing. That is a hypothesis to test, she cautioned, not proof that short answers cause citations.

Check engines separately

A change in one engine does not establish a trend across all AI search. Rimolaityte used Reddit as an example: reduced prominence in ChatGPT did not mean the platform had disappeared from the other engines she examined.

She also described differences in the balance of community, editorial, and brand-owned sources across Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini. In her examples, Gemini's source mix depended heavily on industry.

The practical implication: keep engine-level results visible in reporting. A combined total can obscure where a source remains useful and where it no longer contributes.

Community participation has value beyond citations, she added. If customers already discuss your category on Reddit, those conversations matter in their own right. Rimolaityte recommended honest participation from a company or employee voice — not disguised accounts, and no assumption that presence can simply be bought.

Turn competitor citations into a worklist

The audit begins with 10 to 20 questions customers might ask while choosing a product or provider. Run them in the engines those buyers use, record cited sources, and group them by type. Then inspect the pages where competitors appear and your brand does not.

"If your competitor appears in those sources and you don't, this is your opportunity to get the mention on the source because this source is already being used to get the answer, right?" Rimolaityte said.

The opportunity is more specific than a generic push for brand mentions: you have a source URL, a customer question, and an existing competitor reference to investigate. It still requires judging whether your business genuinely belongs on that page.

Do not give every discovered domain equal priority. Examine citation share and which source categories drive answers in your industry rather than chasing thousands of editorial sites.

Video and measurement

Asked during Q&A whether cited YouTube content had to be user-generated, Rimolaityte said brand and founder content can also work — provided it is insightful, clearly structured, and paired with accurate transcripts. To track a planned video FAQ series, she suggested checking whether the channel or its content appeared among the sources for monitored prompts. A transcript supports that work but does not guarantee a citation.

Making the audit actionable

For agencies that can recommend changes but not implement them, Rimolaityte advised a concise, client-specific report identifying the gaps and giving the client a to-do list. Her recommended audit steps:

1. Choose a manageable question set — 10 to 20 buying questions for one product or service category.
2. Record answers and sources by engine — keep the prompt, observation date, and cited URLs together.
3. Separate source types — owned and retail pages, communities, reviews, editorial coverage.
4. Inspect competitor gaps — read the cited pages and identify a legitimate next step.
5. Assign owners and review again — give specific teams tasks, then repeat the checks to see whether the source mix and brand presence change.

Source: Search Engine Journal (https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-find-the-sources-shaping-ai-answers-in-your-industry/589756/)