Top-cited, Mid-tier, Long-tail, or Invisible.
Each tier requires its own strategy to shift from one cluster to the next. Establishment of the top and mid-tier happens in the first 50 queries submitted per engine when driven by statistically sound queries.

Answer-engine results have measurable variance. Confidence intervals let you detect true movement, avoid false alarms, and determine how much additional sampling is needed to know whether you’re actually improving.

Generative engines lean heavily on traditional search indices to find, rank, and validate the pages they cite. If your content isn’t surfaced, trusted, and well-ranked in those indices, answer engines never see it, let alone cite it. AEO builds on a solid SEO strategy.

Your visibility can swing dramatically by platform. SearchGPT and Perplexity don’t cite the same sites, even on identical queries. Their overlap is often shockingly small. You need platform-specific visibility strategies tuned to how each engine sources, ranks, and cites content.

For many topics, only 8-12 domains dominate citations. If you’re not in that head, you’re rarely seen. Your strategy must be: enter the head, expand within it, or steal share from it.

On average, a generative response contains ~10 citations, regardless of how many good pages exist. If you’re not among the few domains that LLMs already trust, getting cited requires deliberate optimization.