Google now treats AI citation gaming as link spam. Anyone actually working AI Mode/Overviews yet?

From my testing it's mostly the same fundamentals. Pages that rank well, answer questions clearly and get mentioned on trusted sites seem to show up more often in AI results too. I haven't seen any shortcut that beats building real topical authority.

Coming back to this one, because the "who is actually winning AI Mode citations" question just got a real answer, and it is funny.

Profound tracked 32M+ AI Mode results between Apr 15 and Jun 30. The No. 2 most-cited domain in AI Mode is now google.com itself, up 8.4x in about two months. Almost all of it is Google Business Profiles and Product Knowledge Panels getting pulled in as inline cards -> hours, photos, reviews, shown before the user ever reaches a real site.

So while half the forum is trying to reverse-engineer its way into AI citations (the exact thing Google now calls link spam when you game it), Google quietly made itself the second-biggest citation on the board. And it did it in the niches where the money is: home services, restaurants, real estate, healthcare, anything local intent.

The takeaway I am drawing: the winnable AI-citation surface right now is not gaming your way into the answer, it is owning the Google-hosted card AI Mode already trusts. For local queries your GBP basically is the AI citation. Nail that before you spend an hour on schema tricks.

Anyone seeing their own GBP show up inside AI Mode answers yet, or is it still spotty in your niche?

uniteddare said:

From my experience buying listing guest posts and creating links on a websites that Google rank in its AIO - is a good option.

Click to expand...

This is always a good choice

This is always a good choice

Click to expand...

Depends what you mean by good. @uniteddare a link on a site Google ranks in AIO passes normal authority to your page the usual way. It does not make YOU the source the AI cites though. Those are two different taps.

Citation gets picked by fan-out coverage and whoever Google already trusts on the entity, not by who links to whom. The studies bear it out: only around 38% of AI Overview citations even rank in the top 10 for that query now, down from about 76%. So roughly two thirds of what gets cited is not the page winning the classic SERP, never mind the page you dropped a guest link on.

Take the link if the site is genuinely strong, it still helps you rank. Just do not expect it to walk your page into the answer box. The surface you can actually own is the one Google hosts itself, and for local intent your GBP is the citation it reaches for.

Anyone here actually tracked a guest link moving them INTO an AI Overview, or does it only ever move the classic ranking?