How to Get Cited by AI Search Tools: A Content Guide for Derbyshire Businesses
If you have started wondering whether anyone is reading your website anymore, you are not imagining it. More people are asking ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity a question and never clicking through to a website at all. The answer just appears, stitched together from a handful of sources the AI decided were worth citing.
The question I get asked most in client meetings across Derbyshire and the East Midlands right now is some version of the same thing. Which content actually gets cited by AI search tools, and are we wasting our time producing the wrong stuff.
I have spent 18 years building marketing that gets found, first for search engines and now for the AI tools that are quietly reshaping how people search. A recent piece of research surveying 1,000 marketers gives us the clearest answer yet on which content formats earn AI citations, and it is not what most business owners assume. In this post I will walk through what the data actually shows, what it means if you run a trades business, a clinic or a shop rather than a global software company, and exactly what to do about it.
Not sure how your marketing measures up right now?
Check whether AI search tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews are already finding, understanding and citing your business with our free AI Visibility Checker.
Check my AI visibilityWhy AI Search Citations Matter for Businesses Like Yours
A citation is what happens when an AI tool pulls information from your website and presents it as part of its answer, sometimes with a link back, sometimes without. Either way, it is the modern equivalent of ranking on page one. If your content never gets cited, you are invisible in a growing share of searches, no matter how good your website looks.
This is not a future problem. I am already seeing it show up in the traffic data for clients across Derbyshire, from a Belper joinery business to a Wirksworth accountancy practice. Referral traffic from AI tools is still small compared with Google, but it is growing every quarter, and the businesses that understand the pattern now will have a head start over the ones who wait until it shows up on a board report.
The good news is that getting cited by AI search is not a mystery. There is data on it. The question is whether your content is built in a way that gives an AI tool something worth quoting.
The Nine Content Types AI Search Tools Actually Cite
The research I mentioned, based on a survey of 1,000 marketers, broke down exactly which on-site content types earn AI citations. Here is the full picture.
- Listicles and roundups: 21.87 per cent, the single biggest share
- Articles: 16.68 per cent
- Product pages: 13.66 per cent
- Category and hub pages: 11.24 per cent
- Homepage and profile pages: 10.37 per cent
- Other page types: 9.92 per cent
- Discussion and community pages: 7.53 per cent
- How-to guides: 6.22 per cent
- Comparison and alternative pages: 2.5 per cent, the smallest share
The first thing that jumps out is that no single format dominates. AI tools are pulling from a genuinely diverse mix of page types, which means a business betting everything on one content style, usually blog articles, is leaving citations on the table.
Most small businesses I meet have one content format. A blog. Maybe a decent homepage. The data is telling us that is exactly the gap AI search tools are punishing. Stuart Baddiley, Optimise Your Marketing
The second thing worth noting is that comparison and alternative pages sit right at the bottom, at just 2.5 per cent, despite the fact that this type of content tends to convert visitors at a high rate once they do land on it. That gap between low citation share and high commercial value is not a sign that comparison content does not work. It is a sign that hardly anyone in most industries has bothered to write it properly, which is actually good news if you are one of the few who does.
What This Means If You Run a Business, Not a Marketing Blog
Neil Patel's own research is aimed at big content teams with dozens of writers. Most business owners in Derbyshire and the wider East Midlands do not have that. So here is how I translate this data for the clients I actually work with.
Listicles work because they are structured for extraction
An AI tool needs to lift a clean, self-contained chunk of information to quote. A listicle hands it that chunk on a plate. "7 signs your boiler needs replacing before winter" or "5 questions to ask before hiring a kitchen fitter in Derbyshire" are formats an AI can extract from cleanly, because each point stands alone.
I worked with a heating engineer near Ripley who had one long, rambling blog post about boiler maintenance. We broke it into three focused listicle-style guides instead. Within a few months, two of them were showing up as sources in AI-generated answers for local heating queries.
Product and service pages are doing more work than owners realise
At 13.66 per cent, product pages punch well above what most small business owners expect. If your service pages read like a vague paragraph of marketing waffle rather than a clear, specific description of what you do, who it is for, and what it costs, you are handing AI tools nothing to cite. A Matlock guest house I worked with rewrote its room pages with specific detail, actual pricing bands and clear answers to the questions guests actually ask, and saw a noticeable lift in both search and AI-driven enquiries.
Comparison pages are your quiet opportunity
Because so few businesses in most local sectors produce genuine comparison content, this is one of the easiest gaps to exploit. A Chesterfield dental practice we worked with built an honest page comparing types of teeth whitening treatment, including the ones they do not offer, and it became one of their highest-converting pages within six months. Honesty about trade-offs is exactly what makes comparison content trustworthy enough for an AI tool to cite.
An Ashbourne retailer went from invisible to cited in under four months
After restructuring their site content around clear product pages, a short buying guide and one honest comparison page, an independent retailer in Ashbourne started appearing as a cited source in AI-generated shopping answers for their category, alongside a steady rise in organic search traffic.
See how we approach AI marketingWhere Most East Midlands Businesses Get This Wrong
The most common mistake I see is not a lack of effort. It is scattergun effort. A business publishes the odd blog post, updates the homepage once a year, and never touches the format mix at all. Given the data shows citations spread across nine different content types, that approach guarantees you are only ever fighting for a slice of the pie.
The second mistake is treating how-to guides as the obvious answer, because they feel like the natural "helpful content" format. The data says otherwise. How-to guides sit near the bottom at 6.22 per cent. That does not mean stop writing them. It means stop assuming they are your whole strategy.
The third mistake, and the one I see most often with local businesses, is writing for search engines the way we did in 2015, dense keyword-stuffed paragraphs, rather than writing in a way that gives an AI model a clean, factual, quotable answer. Short, direct, specific sentences win. Waffle does not get cited, however well it ranks.
How to Actually Build This Into Your Marketing
Start with an audit of what you already have. Map your existing pages against those nine categories. Most businesses I sit down with in Derbyshire discover they are almost entirely reliant on one or two formats, usually a homepage and the odd blog article.
From there, prioritise based on where the gaps are biggest relative to your industry. If you have no comparison content at all, that is your quickest win, given how little competition exists in that format across most local sectors. If your product or service pages are thin, that is worth fixing before you write another blog post, since those pages already carry 13.66 per cent of citation share.
This all sits inside a wider system, not a one-off content sprint. Your search and SEO strategy, your website structure and how you test and measure results all need to work together, otherwise you end up with isolated pieces of good content that never add up to a coherent AI visibility strategy. Keeping customer data and enquiry follow-up organised through a proper CRM also matters here, because AI-driven traffic still needs to convert once it lands.
How This Fits Into the Bigger Picture
AI search visibility is not a separate discipline sitting off to one side of your marketing. It is one pillar within the BIG12 framework I have used with businesses across Derbyshire and the East Midlands for the past 18 years, sitting alongside your website, your brand, your local presence and how you track results. Get the content format mix right and it strengthens every other pillar, because the same well-structured pages that earn AI citations also convert better and rank better in traditional search.
If you want to see exactly where your business stands across all twelve pillars, not just content, that is precisely what the BIG12 framework does, and you can learn the full approach through our online marketing training.
See where your marketing stands against all 12 pillars
The BIG12 Scorecard shows you exactly where content, AI visibility and the rest of your marketing measure up, in about ten minutes.
Take the BIG12 ScorecardThe challenge is never learning. It is doing.
None of what I have covered here is complicated. Diversify your content formats, fix your product and service pages, write the comparison content nobody else bothers with, and stop treating AI search visibility as separate from the rest of your marketing. Most business owners reading this will nod along and agree with every word.
The part that actually separates the businesses winning AI citations from the ones still wondering where their traffic went is not understanding. It is finding the time, across a busy week running a business in Derbyshire or anywhere else, to actually restructure the pages, write the honest comparison guide and keep it consistent month after month.
That gap between knowing and doing is exactly where I spend most of my time with clients. Eighteen years in, the businesses that come out ahead are rarely the ones with the cleverest strategy. They are the ones who actually implemented a decent one.
Book a free 90-minute audit with Stuart
We will look at your current marketing, benchmark it against the BIG12, and give you a practical set of actions to take. No sales pitch. No fluff. Just 18 years of honest advice applied to your business.
Book your free audit