Part one of four on getting visible in agentic: how AI citations really work, why it all comes back to your product data, and three things to do next.
The first in a four-part series on what “getting visible in agentic” actually means – starting with the one everyone asks about, and almost nobody has joined the dots on.
So, here’s a conversation I’ve had about four hundred times in the last six months. It goes like this.
“Warren, we really need to be more visible in agentic.”
Great. What do you mean by that?
And then – a little pause. And we both know what the pause means. They know it's a buzzword, they know it matters, they've been told upstairs it's strategic. They just haven't quite pinned down what it means in practice yet – and they'd rather not be put on the spot about it.
Which is completely fair. So, I do the kind thing. "Let me break it down – might be useful for the others in the room too." Wink. Everyone gets to keep their dignity, and we get to have the real conversation. So let me do the same for you here.
Which is fine, by the way. That’s exactly where the SEO industry was twenty-odd years ago. Senior people, curious, a bit anxious, asking quietly – how does this actually work? I ran an agency for 20 years, devoted to patiently answering that question.
“Getting visible in agentic” really breaks down into about four things.
- Being cited in AI chat responses.
- Getting your products listed when they return products.
- Having your own embedded experience inside the assistant.
- And running a proper AI assistant on your own site.
Four ideas. Four newsletters. We’ll deep-dive each one. And we’re starting at the top, with the one everybody fixates on first – citation.
Those little hyperlinked buttons everyone wants
You know the ones. You ask ChatGPT a question, and the answer comes back with a handful of little source buttons tucked into it. Click one, it takes you to a website. That’s a citation. And right now, every e-commerce director on the planet wants to be in there.
Fair enough. But before you can be in there, you have to understand something that trips almost everyone up.
Citations are not a default. ChatGPT doesn’t show them every time. It shows them only when it decides it needs to go and get information – to ground its answer in something it can’t quite produce from its training alone.
Sometimes the model just knows the answer and tells you. No sources, no fuss. Other times it needs something current, or something more subjective, or something it should really double-check. You’ve seen it pause and say it’s searching. That little “thinking” moment? That’s it going out to look.
Ask it the Bitcoin price. It’s not going to answer from data it last saw months ago – ten minutes ago the price was different. So it goes and grounds the answer in something real, and it shows you where it looked. That’s the whole game. Grounding.
Imagine if Google didn’t always give you results. Sometimes a list, sometimes nothing. That’s the world we’re now in.
But don’t sleep on Google
Everything so far has been about ChatGPT. And ChatGPT, as we’ve seen, is selective – it only cites when it decides grounding is worth it.
Google plays it differently. It’s far more generous with citations. For a lot of queries, the two are neck and neck, but where it counts, Google shows its sources more readily. And that’s not an accident – it’s in Google’s DNA.
Think about what Google has always done. It ranks a source because it trusts it. It looks at what a page says, who links to it, what goes on there – and decides whether to back it. That instinct to vouch for a source is baked in. So, when Google serves an AI answer, it leans the same way it always has: here’s the answer, and here’s where you can go and check.
Which means the citation action is, quietly, happening more on Google than on ChatGPT. Scroll down under one of those AI answers, and you’ll often find the very same sources sitting in the blue links below. Same footprint, doing double duty.
But – and this is the whole point – it only works the same way in both. You get cited because you have a credible, authoritative footprint in the space. Not in selling the stuff. In the space. Having a validated, referenceable opinion on the topic itself.
And it’s prime real estate
This is the part that should make you sit up. That citation slot is at the top of the page. Front and centre. And it’s not polluted by ads.
Remember when you’d fight to rank top three for something, and you were genuinely proud of it – and then there were five ads, a shopping block, a map listing, and your hard-won organic result got shoved halfway down the screen?
Organic visibility has been diluting for years in favour of paid. So, everyone went chasing paid links because that’s where the obvious commercial conversions were. The back-burner stuff – content marketing, your informational pages, your answer strategy – got quietly parked.
Well, here’s prime real estate, front and centre, opening up organically again. Another shot at the top of the page. There’s a real reason to go back after it.
But you don’t get in for free. You need an authoritative, credible, referenceable presence in the space to get there. That’s the price of the ticket.
The same question, three ways, one citation
Let me show you what this looks like in practice, because we sat and tested it.
Ask ChatGPT “what are the hot dresses for summer right now?” and it goes off thinking. It searches retailers. It also goes to the taste-making magazines – the Vogues, the InStyles – to read the trend in that category. Then it comes back with products and citations. It spotted shopping intent, so it went shopping.
Now ask it “how do I style beige tailored trousers for a smart-casual office look?” That’s advisory. Different mode. And here’s the kicker – we asked essentially the same styling question in slightly different ways, and only one of them came back with citations.
Same intent. Same person. One citation. The engine is exercising judgement on what you actually want and deciding for itself whether grounding is useful enough to show you.
So, the first thing to swallow is this: you cannot guarantee a citation. Not every chat brings one back. Even on Google, the more generous of the two, it’s still the engine’s call. You’re not buying a guaranteed slot. You’re maximising your chances of being chosen when the moment comes.
How the magic actually happens (spoiler: it isn’t magic)
Remember when Google first appeared, and the magazines told us it sent spiders crawling out across the web? It wasn’t quite how it worked, but it was a good story. And people loved the story because it made the invisible feel understandable.
So let me give you the real version for agentic, because once you see it, the whole thing stops being mysterious.
When the model decides it needs to ground an answer, it doesn’t just read your page the way you do. First, it interprets your messy, rambly request and turns it into a search strategy – sometimes called a query fan-out. It breaks “something about beige trousers, smart office, casual” into a set of cleaner searches it can actually run.
Then it goes and runs them. And who does it ask? A search index. Google leans on its own grounding index. ChatGPT does some live fetching, but it largely grounds on Bing’s index. I’ve verified that – it’s well documented now, and it makes perfect sense given who owns what.
So the model interprets, fans out into searches, queries an index, and grounds its answer in whatever clean, readable content it finds. Then – and only then – it cites.
Read that back. Interpret. Search. Ground. Cite. Where in that chain is the new, exotic, never-seen-before thing you need to go and buy?
That was the mechanism. Here’s why it all points one direction.
We’ve covered two things. One, citations only appear when the engine decides it needs to ground an answer. Two, when it does, it searches a search index for authoritative content. Put those together, and something slightly annoying falls out.
Being cited is, fundamentally, an SEO strategy.
I know. That’s not the shiny answer anyone wants. There’s no clever agentic workaround, no secret button. If you want to appear when ChatGPT goes looking, you need a footprint in the search space for that topic. The content has to be there, on the right pages, readable by the lighter-weight bots that build these fresh grounding indexes.
No footprint, no grounding. No grounding, no citation. And here’s where it loops back to the last thing we talked about in this newsletter – the own-label products with no digital CV. Brands get cited because they have a footprint. They have a CV across the internet. A commodity with no CV doesn’t get the call.
Add third-party citations on top – the media, the tastemakers, the creators talking about you outside your own product listings – and you’re maximising every single chance of being grounded. That’s the brand with the strongest CV winning again, in a new arena.
To be great in the future, you need to be great at the basics you’re already aware of. That’s the whole thing.
Why does nobody see this straight away? Because they haven’t drawn the conclusion that it’s SEO-related. They understand SEO perfectly well. They just haven’t put the two things together yet. And that connection – that’s the bit worth owning.
I don’t have anything wildly new to tell you about what to go and do. But now you know how it works. You know the mechanism, so you know exactly where to direct your effort. The answer’s been staring at you the whole time.
Three things to do before Tuesday next
1. Accept the relationship – and its limits.
Search and citation aren’t two worlds; one doesn’t exist without the other. But accept that you can never guarantee a citation. The engine decides when grounding is useful and only cites then. Your job is to maximise the chances, not to demand a slot.
2. Go back to SEO 101 – and mean it.
Understand the prompts your pages could plausibly answer. Map them to the topics you want to be visible under. Then make sure clean, readable content actually sits on those pages, in customer language, where the bots can see it. This is hygiene, not heroics.
3. Build the footprint, on-site and off.
You need a CV in the indexes that ground these answers – strong own pages, plus third-party citations from media, creators and tastemakers. The stronger your footprint across the search space, the more often you’re the source the engine chooses to trust.
You came in wanting a clever trick to get into those little citation buttons. You’re leaving with the realisation that the answer is the work you already know how to do, done properly, in a new context. That’s not a disappointment. That’s a relief.
Next time, part two: product listings. What happens when the engine doesn’t just cite you – it returns your actual products. Look out for it.
Until Tuesday after next.
Warren Cowan
Founder & CEO, FoundIt!
About FoundIt!
FoundIt! is the intent-led commerce platform that delivers +4-6% sitewide revenue for multi-category retailers, including M&S, B&Q, John Lewis, Saks and Neiman Marcus. We close the gap between how your catalogue is organised and how your customers actually shop – without a rip-and-replace.