Blogging Strategies That Help You Earn AI Citations and Build Trust Faster

TL;DR: Tweak two blogging best practices will help you build trust with prospects faster - and help you show up in AI citations.

A true mark of thought leadership is whether you are cited by AI in those AI overviews that (almost) always appear at the top of search results. If that’s a goal of yours, this blog post is for.

But even if you don’t care, this blog post will help you write blog posts that build trust faster with your prospects. This is especially important when they’re at the decision stage (more on this below).

All of this goodness comes courtesy of my friend Kim Fredrich[MJ1] , who sent me this article by Kim Albee[MJ2] with a note – “thought you might want to read this”. Well, I just read it, threw out the blog post idea I had for this week, and am writing about this topic instead.

Here’s a rundown of what I learned in Kim’s post.

Stop writing “best of” blog posts when you’re trying to convert leads

Listicle blog posts have their place at the “top of the funnel” – when people are just starting to do research and find companies they trust.

You want to keep their attention and build that trust while they research. That means you need to do two things:

1: Cover the topic from multiple angles.

2: Go deep every time you write about it.

Google’s Helpful Content guidelines (covered fully in this blog post) look at both of these factors. So does AI – but AI really gets into the weeds.

How AI evaluates your blog posts

Let’s say you want to get found for Product Z, your top selling and most lucrative product.

You have a dozen deep blog posts on it. When AI is “reading” your site, it asks:

Do the ideas in your blog posts connect?
Does one idea build on another?
Is your expertise integrated or scattered?

It wants to see “a knowledge ecosystem” – a mini library of ideas that all support each other.

One blog post introduces a topic at an introductory level and a second post builds on it at the intermediate level
Five blog posts each tackle a common myth but also discuss the relationships between one myth and the next
One blog post is a case study showing how you overcame a couple of myths and tackled a client’s big business challenge

Having a library like this positions a brand for AI citations. And in fact, AI will “actively surface and reference your expertise rather than passing over it,” Kim writes. “AI can follow the thread of expertise…. It can map it, evaluate its depth, and confidently cite it as an authoritative source.”

“Oh, but this is only applicable to massive companies,” you might think. Nope! Companies with niche blogs often beat out larger sites in AI citations. “It’s not the volume of content. It’s the strength of the connections,” Kim says.

So, how do you do this?

Pss - If you can’t do it because you just don’t have time, well, that’s why companies sign up for our blog copywriting service. We’ll get your expertise into a blog post and onto your website so you can start building trust with prospects, AI, and Google. Reach out today to start the conversation.

Build trust and earn AI citations by tweaking these two blogging best practices

You don’t need to burn everything down and start over. You just need to build on the blogging best practices you already follow.

Answer the one question your clients really have

At the end of the day, your clients want to know how Product Z is going to solve a business challenge they have. Kim suggests answering this one question:

“What someone need to understand to genuinely solve this problem?”

Don’t worry too much about the keyword. Focus on this question, and you’ll have blog post topics that deliver deep, thoughtful responses, which is exactly what your clients are looking for when they’re ready to buy.

Connect ideas from one post to the next – and not just via links

Above I shared examples of what you could have in your content library for a topic. One is: five blog posts each tackle a common myth but also discuss the relationships between one myth and the next.

By cross-referencing the myths, you are naturally connecting ideas. Specifically state you are doing this in each blog post. “As I mentioned in the blog post on Myth A, Myth B is a natural byproduct of this misunderstanding.”

AI actually reads this type of language to understand if your blog posts are authoritative.

By following these best practices, blogging becomes a competitive advantage

You are the only person with your specific expertise. No one else has your ideas, can connect those ideas like you, or share the same client stories and experiences.

This is one of the reasons I discourage people from using AI to write thought leadership pieces or website content. AI will never be able to tap into your knowledge base. Only you can write to the level that AI is looking for.

The effort is worth the reward. When you start getting cited in AI overviews, share that -that’s such a huge win and really burnishes your credibility.

And, as Kim points out, you’ll also be more likely to show up in “regular” search results. Google’s Helpful Content system rewards topical cohesion, which compounds on itself, like that interest in your 401(k).

Use your blog to build trust with the people and bots that matter

For further blog post topic inspiration, check out the ideas I offer here. And yes, writing the juicy blog posts AI is looking for will take time. But you can do it.