Cited.
An operational manual on Generative Engine Optimisation — the discipline of being read, retrieved, and attributed by the models your customers now ask first.
Fifteen chapters. One operating plan.
Cited is shorter than a book and longer than a blog post on purpose. It is the document a marketing leader can read on a flight and act on the next morning.
- 01
The click is gone
Why generative engines do not rank pages, and why most SEO teams are optimising for the wrong unit of work.
- 02
What carries over
The disciplines that survive the transition. Crawl-budget thinking, semantic structure, and the architecture of a discoverable corpus.
- 03
What is new
Citation mechanics, retrieval traces, and the four moves that make a passage retrievable by a frontier model.
- 04
Technical primer
A working vocabulary for marketing leaders. Embeddings, retrieval, grounding, and the consent surface in plain language.
- 05
Dual-layer citation
How Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini retrieve, weight, and attribute. The two-layer citation graph that decides whether you are quoted.
- 06
The six engines
Profiles of the six generative engines that matter for B2B marketing in 2026. What each indexes, what each cites, and where each falls short.
- 07
Crawler portfolio
A working knowledge of the crawlers that read your site for AI training and retrieval. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and the rest.
- 08
YouTube and multimodal
Why YouTube is now an AI training surface, and what to do about it. Captions, chapter markers, and machine-readable transcripts.
- 09
Content extractability
The structural moves — claim density, named-entity grounding, semantic anchoring — that make a passage retrievable.
- 10
The entity bible
A practical playbook for entity resolution. Schema.org, Wikidata, knowledge panels, and the canonical claims you control.
- 11
Authority without backlinks
What replaces backlinks when the engine does not click. A working definition of authority for the agentic web.
- 12
Measurement
Citation share, prompt coverage, attribution latency. The four metrics that replace position-tracking.
- 13
A 90-day playbook
What a marketing leader does in week one, week six, and week thirteen. Roles, artefacts, and review cadence.
- 14
Operating model
Where GEO sits in the marketing org. Reporting lines, tool stack, and the agency relationship rewritten.
- 15
What we don’t know
A short, honest list of the open questions. Where to place small bets. What to ignore. What to watch.
Written for four
specific readers.
- 01
Heads of marketing whose organic traffic has begun to decline without an obvious cause.
- 02
SEO leads being asked to explain why traditional KPIs no longer correlate with revenue.
- 03
Communications and PR leaders writing for an audience that increasingly reads through an agent.
- 04
Founders who suspect their category is being explained to buyers by a model, not a search engine.
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manual.
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- · Free to read and to share.
- · Cited may be redistributed within your organisation.
A note from
the author.
Cited started as one chapter of The Agentic CMO. It outgrew its allocation. The argument was too operational for the book — full of file formats, crawler specifications, and ninety-day plans — and too urgent to hold for a second printing.
So I cut it loose. The manual is free because the marketing function is in a difficult quarter and the people who need this information most are also the people most likely to be told they cannot expense another book.