Take a buyer asking who does industrial coatings for offshore wind towers in Scotland. The answer is built from whatever pages the search returned. A directory, a customer’s project page, a partner listing, a trade announcement, and perhaps one supplier’s site. A vendor gets mentioned because one of those 5 pages mentions it.
So how to get mentioned is a question about other people’s pages. Which ones can carry your name, and what you’d have to give them.
We don’t do link building, and our about page lists “Link building and guest-post placement” under what we refuse. What follows is the version of this that we’re prepared to put our name to.
A mention is not a citation, and both count
An answer can name you without linking to you. We drew the line in what an AI citation is. A name in the text is a mention. A link under the text is a citation.
The assistant can mention you because a page it cited mentions you. Then the citation goes to somebody else’s page, and the mention is yours.
For a B2B vendor that is often the realistic first step. Your own page has to compete for the citation. Your name on a customer’s page rides along with theirs.
The pages that mention you are judged as sites
Perplexity’s help centre explains, in an article last modified 9 September 2026, that it rates the domains it cites, and that the rating is for the site rather than the page. The 3 questions it lists are worth copying out. “Does the site correct its mistakes?” comes first. Then whether it names the author of each piece. Then whether it separates news from advertising and opinion.
The same page says most sites have no label at all, and that having none is not a mark against them. So it describes the kind of page worth being mentioned on: one that names its authors, corrects itself, and keeps the paid content apart from the rest. A directory that sells its listings fails the third test before you’ve read it.
Where a B2B company gets mentioned without paying for it
The first place is a customer’s site: the case study on their side, the “who we work with” page, the integration page that lists you as a connector. You’re mentioned there because the work happened.
What it takes is asking, plus a paragraph they can paste that names the product and the result. Our case study service exists because that paragraph is worth writing carefully.
The second is the partner’s directory. Every platform you integrate with keeps a list. Some of those lists get quoted by assistants, because they are the canonical answer to “what integrates with X”. The listing is free. Keeping it accurate is the cost.
The third is the industry body: member lists, accreditation registers, certified-supplier pages. Dull, and exactly the kind of page an assistant reads when a buyer adds “certified” or “accredited” to the question.
The fourth is the event page, the speaker and exhibitor lists from the 2 conferences your buyers attend. Dated and named. Hosted by an organisation with a reason to keep it accurate.
The fifth is the announcement. A funding round, a launch, an appointment: news a journalist would print gets a page on a site that says who wrote each piece. That’s what a press release is for, and it’s the one format on this list we’d charge for.
Each would mention you, given a reason and the text.
What to send them
One paragraph, written to be pasted, with the company name spelled as you want it. What you do, in the buyer’s words. One number with a date: 120 customers, 12 years, a certification, a capacity in tonnes. A link to the page you’d want cited.
The paragraph should be true on somebody else’s site 2 years from now, which rules out “leading” and “innovative” and rules in “founded 2014”, “ISO 13485 since 2021”, “40 installations in the UK”. If it can’t be checked, it won’t be quoted, and it may not be published.
What Google says about the fake version
Google’s guide to generative AI search, updated in July 2026, addresses this directly. It says its generative features “can show what’s being said about products and services across the web, including in blogs, videos, and forum discussions”. Then it says that seeking inauthentic mentions across the web “isn’t as helpful as it might seem”.
The reason is on the same page: the ranking systems “focus on high-quality content while other systems block spam”. Google’s changelog records, in May 2026, that it “Clarified that our spam policies also apply to generative AI responses in Google Search”. So a mention manufactured on a page nobody reads is a mention on a page the systems are built to ignore.
The list, and the month it takes
Five kinds of page, one paragraph, and a month of emails. Perhaps 15 of them. Start with the customers, because those mentions carry the result as well as the name. Then the partner directories, because the listing form is already there. The body, the events and the announcement follow as they come up.
Before any of it, run the free check. It takes 3 working days and records who the assistants name for your 3 questions today, and which pages they cite for those names. When the cited pages turn out to be the directories and customer sites above, the list writes itself.
If a page of your own then needs to be written so it can carry the citation itself, that’s the AI citations article.