We run the same set of buyer questions against the major answer engines every day and record every domain they cite. Posting what the source mix actually looks like, because most advice in this space assumes the models cite vendor websites and they mostly do not.
The pattern that holds across categories
The cited domains cluster into five types, in roughly this order of frequency:
Community threads. Reddit above all, and it is not close. Forum and community content is cited heavily across nearly every category we sample, including this one. If your buyers discuss the problem somewhere public, that place is probably being read.
Established trade publications. The obvious ones for your sector. Stable, hard to get into, and heavily weighted when they do cover you.
Review and comparison platforms. G2, Capterra and their category-specific equivalents. Also independent reviewers with any standing.
Directories and listings. Underrated. Cheap to get into, cited more often than their prestige suggests.
Vendor sites. Present, but far less often than vendors expect, and usually only when the question names the vendor directly.
What almost never gets cited
Company blog posts about generic topics. Press release wires. Thin listicles on low-authority domains. And, at least in our sampling, llms.txt appears to have no effect at all. It costs nothing to publish and we cannot detect the major engines reading it.
The practical consequence
The list of domains cited in any single category is short. Usually under thirty. It is also stable enough week to week to be a usable target list rather than a moving one.
That means the work is knowable. Ask your buyers' twenty most common questions, record every domain in every answer, rank by frequency, and you have your entire outreach brief. Most teams never build this list and instead optimise their own pages, which is the part with the least leverage.
Two caveats on method
Model answers vary substantially on rephrasing alone. If you are not holding your question set fixed, you are measuring variance, not change. And a single sample tells you nothing. This only works as a repeated measurement.
We build Mentionry, which is exactly this loop run daily and turned into outreach. Posting the pattern because it is useful whether or not you use anything we make. Check https://mentionry.com
Source: r/Mentionry · by /u/f3425