---
title: "Before you write a new page, look at the pages AI already cites. Most of them are somebody else's list."
url: "/blog/pages-ai-already-cites"
canonical_url: "https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/pages-ai-already-cites"
markdown_url: "https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/pages-ai-already-cites.md"
language: "en"
last_updated: "2026-09-27"
type: "blog"
summary: "Three categories, 2,762 AI answers over 90 days. In two of them a third of all answers cite one ranking page. Find those pages first, then get on them."
site: "CrunchJunkie"
llms_txt: "https://crunchjunkie.io/llms.txt"
---

# Before you write a new page, look at the pages AI already cites. Most of them are somebody else's list.
Source: https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/pages-ai-already-cites
Published: 2026-09-27 · By Philipp Enders · AI visibility · 9 min read

When a client is missing from AI answers, the reflex is to write something new. Before that, it is worth looking at what the engines already cite when they answer the questions your buyers ask. We pulled every cited source for three categories we track, 2,762 answers over ninety days, and sorted the pages by how often they were used. The pattern is the same in all three: a handful of pages carry most of the citations, and most of those pages are not company websites. They are rankings, directories and best-of lists that somebody else maintains. Getting onto them is a shorter route than writing your way there.

## The short version
In the German SEO-agency category, one blog post, a best-agencies list on ucentric-media.de, was cited in 345 of 1,033 answers. In the German digital-agency category, the BVDW's agency rankings were cited in 428 of 1,302 answers. That is a third of all answers in each case, from one domain. In the AI-visibility software category the top source is a vendor, otterly.ai, cited in 87 of 427 answers, but the next tier is again lists: a blog post on useomnia.com with 60 citations, SE Ranking's tracker page with 36, three more best-tools articles with around 30 each. Of the ten most-cited domains, five are lists in the SEO category, six in the digital-agency category and five in the tools category. The agencies' own sites appear too, lower down. Suchhelden's site was cited in 117 answers, PLAN.NET's in 30, ours in 36.

## German SEO agencies: one list carries a third of the answers
The category has 549 distinct cited domains over ninety days, which sounds like a long tail. It is, but the head is very heavy. The ucentric-media list of the best SEO agencies was cited 208 times on its own and the domain in 345 answers. OMR's SEO-agencies review category and its content hub together took 312 citations. Sortlist's SEO page, Keyweo's FAQ on the best agencies, mister-seo's top ten and Hecht ins Gefecht's list of the most visible SEO agencies in language models each sit above a hundred. Read the table as the engines' reading list for the question "which SEO agency in Germany": if you are not on these pages, the engines are not reading about you when they answer it. Agency homepages (evergreen.media 196 citations, hechtinsgefecht.de 182, dreikon.de 106, onlinesolutionsgroup.de 102) are cited as well; they are left out of this table because the point is the pages you do not own.

| Page | Kind | Citations | Domain cited in answers |
| --- | --- | ---: | --- |
| ucentric-media.de/blog/beste-seo-agenturen/ | List | 208 | 345 of 1,033 |
| omr.com/de/reviews/service-category/seo-agencies | Review category | 163 | 265 of 1,033 |
| omr.com/de/reviews/contenthub/seo-agenturen | List | 149 | 265 of 1,033 |
| suchhelden.de | Own site | 122 | 117 of 1,033 |
| sortlist.de/seo/deutschland-de | Directory | 115 | 190 of 1,033 |
| keyweo.com/de/seo/faq/beste-agenturen-deutschland/ | List | 114 | 119 of 1,033 |
| mister-seo.com/die-10-besten-seo-agenturen-in-deutschland/ | List | 114 | 145 of 1,033 |
| hechtinsgefecht.de/sichtbarste-seo-agenturen-llm-deutschland/ | List | 111 | 210 of 1,033 |
| agenturtipp.de/seo-agenturen/ | Directory | — | 171 of 1,033 |

Most-cited pages when AI engines answer questions about German SEO agencies. 1,033 answers, 90 days to 27 September 2026. Citations are of the exact page; the domain figure counts answers citing any page on it.

## German digital agencies: the rankings are the answer
The digital-agency category is broader, 1,271 cited domains, and even more concentrated at the top. The BVDW, the German digital-industry association, publishes an annual internet-agency ranking, and the engines lean on it hard: the 2026 ranking page was cited 147 times, the 2025 page 104 times, the creative ranking 89 times, and the domain as a whole in 428 of 1,302 answers. iBusiness's owner-managed agency ranking follows with 76 citations, then agenturtipp's directory, a dreikon top-ten article, thebestagency's ranking and Horizont's coverage of the same BVDW ranking. When an engine answers "which digital agency in Germany", it is largely reading the BVDW list and the pages that repeat it. PLAN.NET's own site was cited in 30 of those 1,302 answers.

| Page | Kind | Citations | Domain cited in answers |
| --- | --- | ---: | --- |
| bvdw.org/rankings/internetagentur-ranking-2026/ | Ranking | 147 | 428 of 1,302 |
| bvdw.org/rankings/internetagentur-ranking-2025/ | Ranking | 104 | 428 of 1,302 |
| bvdw.org/rankings/kreativranking-rankings/ | Ranking | 89 | 428 of 1,302 |
| ibusiness.de/inhabergefuehrte-digitalagentur-ranking/ | Ranking | 76 | 212 of 1,302 |
| agenturtipp.de/digitalagenturen/ | Directory | 70 | 180 of 1,302 |
| dreikon.de/…/die-10-besten-agenturen-deutschlands-2026/ | List | 68 | 90 of 1,302 |
| thebestagency.de/the-best-agency-ranking/ | Ranking | 64 | 72 of 1,302 |
| horizont.net/…/digitalagenturen-internetagentur-ranking-2026 | Press | 57 | 124 of 1,302 |
| sortlist.de/s/digitale-transformation/deutschland-de | Directory | — | 236 of 1,302 |

Most-cited pages when AI engines answer questions about German digital agencies. 1,302 answers, 90 days to 27 September 2026.

## AI-visibility software: vendors and best-of posts
Our own category behaves a little differently, and it is worth being honest about that. The most-cited source is a competitor's homepage, otterly.ai, in 87 of 427 answers, and Semrush's free visibility checker is close behind at 85. Vendors get cited for their own product pages here in a way agencies do not. But the second tier is lists again: a tools round-up on useomnia.com with 60 citations, SE Ranking's tracker page, best-tools posts on alhena.ai, therankmasters.com, integrate.io and frase.io, each cited around thirty times, and Ahrefs's help article on Brand Radar. Our own site was cited in 36 answers. A single third-party article, an ecommercefastlane.com piece about us, was cited 26 times on its own, which is most of what a mid-table best-of post gets. A page's citation count can exceed the number of answers citing its domain when one answer cites the same page more than once, which Perplexity in particular does.

| Page | Kind | Citations | Domain cited in answers |
| --- | --- | ---: | --- |
| otterly.ai/ | Vendor site | 83 | 87 of 427 |
| useomnia.com/blog/ai-search-monitoring-tools | List | 60 | 18 of 427 |
| seranking.com/ai-visibility-tracker.html | Vendor page | 36 | 24 of 427 |
| semrush.com/free-tools/ai-search-visibility-checker/ | Vendor page | 32 | 85 of 427 |
| alhena.ai/blog/ai-brand-visibility-tracking-tools/ | List | 31 | 18 of 427 |
| therankmasters.com/…/best-ai-tools-monitor-saas-brand-visibility | List | 29 | — |
| integrate.io/blog/best-ai-visibility-tracking-tools/ | List | 29 | — |
| frase.io/blog/the-10-best-ai-visibility-tools-in-2026 | List | 27 | — |
| crunchjunkie.io/ | Own site | 26 | 36 of 427 |

Most-cited pages when AI engines answer questions about AI-visibility tools. 427 answers, 90 days to 27 September 2026.

## A list is a page too. It just is not yours.
The usual advice for a brand that is absent from AI answers is to produce the content the engines want: a comparison page, an FAQ, a well-structured guide. That is not wrong, and our content briefs are built for exactly that. But the citation data says the engines' first move on a category question is to find a page that has already done the comparing for them. A ranking with a method, a directory with two hundred entries, a best-of post with ten names. Those pages are cheap for the engine to trust because they aggregate. Your new comparison page competes with them for the same slot, and it starts with no citations. The list already has hundreds. So the order of work is: get onto the pages that are already cited, then build the page that could one day be cited itself. The first is outreach. The second is content. Most teams do the second and skip the first.

## How to work the list
Pull the cited sources for your prompts over a long enough window, ninety days is comfortable, and sort them by the number of answers that cite them. Ignore the pages you own. Mark the rest as list, press, or someone else's site. For each list, check whether you are on it. If you are not, find out how entries get in. The BVDW ranking takes submissions with revenue figures once a year. OMR Reviews takes a vendor profile and reviews. Sortlist and agenturtipp are directories with a form. A best-of blog post has an author with an email address, and an argument for adding you is much easier to make with the citation count in hand: this page of yours is read by the engines in a third of the answers about our category, and here is why we belong on it. Then keep scanning, and watch two numbers separately: whether your site starts to be cited, and whether your brand starts to be named. They are different things. A page that lists you gets your name into the answer without your site being cited at all, which is often the better of the two outcomes for an agency.

## Cited is not named
It is worth spelling out the distinction, because the two get mixed up in most tools. A citation means the engine used a page as a source. A mention means the engine wrote your name in its answer. Suchhelden's site was cited in 117 of 1,033 answers, and Suchhelden was named in a much larger share of them, because the lists that get cited name it too. Otterly's site was cited in 87 of 427 answers in our category, and it is named more often than that as well. Getting cited is a retrieval problem: can the engine find and trust a page about you. Getting named is a consensus problem: do the pages the engine trusts agree that you belong in the answer. The lists are where that consensus is written down. Which is why being on them moves the second number, not just the first.

## What this does not say
Three categories is three categories. Two of them are German agency markets, where trade associations and rankings are unusually strong and the engines have learnt to lean on them. Our own category is small, 427 answers, and vendor pages carry more weight there. The numbers are counts of citations the engines exposed; engines that reveal no sources for an answer contribute nothing to them, so the true concentration could be higher or lower. And a citation count says how often a page was used, not how much it helped anyone who is on it. The one thing the data does say plainly is where the engines look first, and that is the thing to check before writing anything new.

### FAQ
**How do I find the pages AI engines cite for my category?**
Track a set of buyer questions on the engines, store the sources each answer cites, and count how many answers cited each domain and each page over a long window such as 90 days. In CrunchJunkie this is the Sources tab and the Cited URLs view of an AI-visibility project; the same data is available through get_citations on the MCP connector.

**Are third-party lists really cited more than company websites?**
In the two German agency categories we measured, yes, by a wide margin: one ranking domain was cited in a third of all answers in each category, and five or six of the ten most-cited domains were lists, directories or rankings. In the AI-visibility software category vendor pages led and best-of posts made up the next tier.

**Does being on a cited list mean the engine will name my brand?**
Not automatically, but it is the most direct lever. A citation means the engine used the page as a source; a mention means it wrote your name. Lists are where the engine reads which brands belong in the answer, so being on the cited ones moves mentions, and you should measure the two numbers separately.

### Methodology & data
Three AI-visibility projects tracked in CrunchJunkie, each with its own buyer prompts scanned on a weekly schedule with repeated runs: 109 German SEO agencies (1,033 answers over 90 days), 142 German digital agencies (1,302 answers) and the AI-visibility software category (427 answers). For every answer the engines' cited sources were stored at scan time; the counts here are of genuine citations, not of pages an engine fetched during its search and then did not use. A domain's figure is the number of answers that cited it at least once; a page's figure is the number of citations of that URL. A page was classed as a list when it is a ranking, directory, review category or best-of article about the category; as own site when it belongs to the brand the project tracks; otherwise as other. The window is the 90 whole days to 27 September 2026.

Dataset: https://crunchjunkie.io/blog/data/pages-ai-already-cites-2026-09.csv (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

### Sources
- [BVDW Internetagentur-Ranking 2026](https://www.bvdw.org/rankings/internetagentur-ranking-2026/)
- [OMR Reviews: SEO agencies](https://omr.com/de/reviews/service-category/seo-agencies)
- [iBusiness: owner-managed digital agency ranking](https://www.ibusiness.de/inhabergefuehrte-digitalagentur-ranking/)