Link building & content for tech companies

Get links from the
domains AI already
cites.

Six years, 2,000+ hand-placed links, each on a page with its own traffic. The vetting now has a tenth check: does an AI answer already pull sources from that domain? If it doesn't, the link is a spreadsheet win & nothing else.

Run a citation check on your domain See the site I built to prove it

Open for 3 retainers this quarter · audits from 500 PLN · replies come from me, one person

Jan SuskiLink builder, six years2,000+ links, hand-placed

AI answer, liveCopilot · ChatGPT · AI Overviews

best competitive intelligence tools for a 200-person SaaS

marketintelligencetools.com/rankings/competitive-intelligence-tools/cited

g2.com/categories/competitive-intelligencecited

your-competitor.com/blog/ci-toolscited

your-domain.comnot found

Copilot citations in 7 days for a site I built from zero

Microsoft Clarity, Citation report, 5 Sep 2026

share of all citations in its topics, against every other domain

Share of authority, same report

of that site's sessions arrive from an AI answer, no blue link in between

AI referral traffic, same report

URLs in that site's sitemap, all written & built since 26 July 2026

marketintelligencetools.com/sitemap.xml

Why the target moved

The referring domain that matters now is the one an AI answer trusts.

A DR 80 homepage logo told you nothing in 2023 & tells you less today. When a buyer's AI assistant answers "which tool should we buy", it reads a short list of domains, then re-uses that list. Being linked from one of them is the whole game.

From /reports/reddit-ai-visibility-study/

Machine-generated as well, from Surfer's 57,253-URL study quoted in the article: pages AI Overviews cite every time cover 42% of a topic's facts, against 23% for pages never cited. The domains that get cited are the ones that cover the topic. Those are the domains I go after.

Most link building agencies still sell a DR number. I sell a placement on a domain that shows up in the citations when your buyer asks ChatGPT, Copilot or Google's AI what to buy. The link still passes equity. It also puts your brand inside the pool the answer is written from.

That pool is finite. In a 9-vendor social-listening set I measured on 27 Aug 2026, traffic rank predicted AI mention rank for 7 of 9 tools. The other two swapped places by four or more spots. Traffic gets you close. The citation check gets you the last two.

ChatGPT weekly active users, 18 months

The pool of answers a placement competes to be cited inside

Source: OpenAI, February 2026 disclosure; reporting on weekly figures through late July 2026. Each of those sessions is a chance for a competitor's name to be the one that gets read out.

Case study, my own money

I built marketintelligencetools.com from nothing to test the method on myself first.

231 URLs in a category where vendors hide their pricing. Every review checks each number against its source. The site earns affiliate commission, so the traffic has to convert; a dashboard number on its own pays nothing.

From /reports/reddit-ai-visibility-study/

Machine-generated as well, from the article's own method section: 15 candidate vendors cut to 9, with 3 dropped for zero ChatGPT citation data, 1 for brand-name collision, 2 for a thin sample. The workflow draws the exclusions, so a reader can see what was thrown out and why.

231

URLs in the sitemap on 5 Sep 2026: 80 reviews, 61 reports, 45 rankings, 31 templates, 28 explainers, 25 head-to-heads, 24 industry guides

37.84%

share of authority on "competitive intelligence tools" queries in Copilot, the site against every other cited domain combined

1,255

citations in a week for one page, the intent-data providers ranking; the top nine pages each cleared 530

88.89%

share of authority on "supplier pricing intelligence tools", the query where the site owns the answer outright

Traffic rank vs ChatGPT mention rank, 9 vendors

Same rank order predicts both, except two vendors

Amber lines mark the two vendors whose traffic rank & mention rank diverge by four or more places. Ahrefs Site Explorer & DataForSEO AI Optimization, 27 Aug 2026. Those two are the reason a traffic filter on its own falls short.

Google results for bright data review: Trustpilot first, then the Discussions and forums block with a post from r/marketinteltools, 4 comments, 1 day ago, outlined in amber

48hto a Google forum slot

"bright data review", a vendor-name query. A post on r/marketinteltools, a subreddit I run, landed in Google's Discussions and forums block inside two days, one slot under Trustpilot. Same content engine, different surface.

From /reports/social-listening-pricing/

Every figure on the site is built the same way: one claim, one chart, one dated source line. Retention windows here came from nine help centers, since none of the pricing pages state them.

What the case study proves

None of the 231 pages was typed by a person. Each was drafted by a model, then pushed through a workflow that checks every number, rebuilds every figure & fails the page on any of 160 tells. The output reads as the work of a careful human, and Copilot cites it 14,459 times a week.

That workflow is the product on this page. The links are how I get it seen.

The writing

Three paragraphs from the site. Which of them did a machine write?

Click each card for the answer & the numbers behind it. Sentence lengths are shown as bars: green under 20 words, amber over. No trick question, and the answer is the point of this page.

From the gate's own log, 21 Aug 2026

Machine-generated as well, from the scan output: one construction, "rather", turned up 2,925 times across 260 of 407 pages, 46 on a single page. The word went on the banned list that day and every occurrence was rewritten. That is what a mechanical gate is for.

The same account also produced a much bigger number. On 19 December 2025, House ran a company-discovery scrape against Indeed with one of Bright Data's pre-built dataset scrapers and didn't set a result limit. The "discover" endpoint found 682,000 matching records. At per-record pricing, that added up to a bill north of $1,000 in roughly the time it takes to eat lunch.

Human or machine?

All three. Model-drafted, workflow-finished. Sentences of 9, 25, 7 & 21 words. Four checkable facts: a date, a vendor feature, a record count, a dollar figure. Source: Nathan House, StationX. /reviews/bright-data/

Brand24's ceiling climbs fast. Its published tiers run Individual $199, Team $299, Pro $399, Business $599, all monthly and billed annually, before Enterprise starts at $1,499 a month for custom keyword and mention volumes. API access costs an extra $99 on top of any tier. A buyer tracking 25 keywords with API access is closer to Brandwatch's tracked median than to Awario's Starter plan, inside a nominally "self-serve" product line.

Human or machine?

Machine draft, gate-passed, every price re-checked by me. Sentences of 4, 30, 11 & 25 words. Seven prices, each from Brand24's own pricing page on the day it was read. Claim first, proof in the next sentence. /reports/social-listening-pricing/

Fact completeness makes the same point a third way. Pages that AI Overviews cite every time for a topic (Surfer calls these core sources) cover 42% of that topic's key facts, against 34% for pages cited occasionally and 23% for pages never cited at all. Coverage decides the repeat citation: how much of the topic a page covers, independent of the domain's name or its backlink count.

Human or machine?

Machine draft, gate-passed, study figures verified against the PDF. Sentences of 9, 36 & 22 words. Three percentages from one named study, then the sentence that says what they mean. /reports/reddit-ai-visibility-study/

What makes prose sound like a model wrote it

None of it is mystical. The tells are countable, which is why a script can catch them. A model reaches for the same 200 words, sets every sentence to the same length, and swaps evidence for emphasis. Read enough of it & your eye learns the pattern in a paragraph. Strip the tells, force real sourced numbers in, and the same model produces prose a reader can't tell from a careful human's.

Intensifiers standing in for evidence
26 banned
Contrasting parallelisms
allowed: 0
Em dashes, rhetorical colons, "whether", "rather"~~the punctuation & hinge words models lean on~~
banned outright
Uniform sentence length~~every sentence 18 to 22 words, no 5-word punch, no 35-word run~~
variance checked
Numbers without a source, hedges where a number should be~~"many companies", "can potentially", "studies show"~~
3 hedges max
Paragraphs that open with context, then never land~~"In today's fast-moving world of B2B data..."~~
claim first

What the workflow does about it

A written rule set & a mechanical gate. The list runs to 66 banned words, 75 banned phrases & 19 review-only terms, 160 in total, kept in a plain text file. A 502-line Python script reads every page before it ships and exits with an error on any of them. It also fails a paragraph over 475 characters, a paragraph with over 3 hedges, an H2 section with over 2 uncontracted negatives, three paragraphs in a row opening on the same word, any em dash, any exclamation mark.

Sentence-length bands modelled on a real writer. Mean 18 to 22 words, median near 15, at least 10% of sentences under 10 words & 15% over 20. The profile came from 513,683 words of Louis Rossmann's writing across 5,632 entries: mean 18.34, median 15, standard deviation 15.27.

One checkable fact per 200 words. A price, a date, a company, a version number. Claim in the first sentence, proof in the next two. The model drafts; the workflow pulls each figure from the vendor page, the filing or the study, and anything without a named source gets cut before the gate ever runs. I read the final page myself.

$ python3 scripts/prose_check.py reviews/brand24/index.html
FAIL words "significantly" ×1, "whether" ×2
FAIL paragraph p14 512 chars (max 475)
REVIEW variance mean 21.8 · p10 11 · p90 31
PASS hedges, negatives, openers, headings, citations
exit 1 fix 3 items, re-run

Free · no call

One post, before you pay anything

$0one topic, 1,500+ words

Send a keyword your team has been meaning to cover. It goes through the full workflow & comes back as a page you can publish or bin. If your team reads it and wants more, the next two cards are the prices. If not, keep the post.

every number sourced & dated
one chart, built for the claim it supports
gate report attached, so you see what it caught

Send a topic

Per article · I run the workflow

Articles, priced by batch

$175 to $500each, minimum 2

2 articles	$500 each
5 articles	$400 each
10 articles	$250 each
20+ articles	$175 each	2nd best value

Same workflow as the case study, run on your topics, under your byline, delivered as pages ready for your CMS. Reviews, rankings, comparisons, reports, guides.

Get a batch quote

One-time · yours for good 1st best value

The workflow, installed on your CMS

$1,000flat, paid once

The full rule set, the banned-word list, the gate script & the six per-format specs wired into your own publishing step, with a two-hour walkthrough. No subscription, no seat licence, no renewal. It keeps working after I leave, at $0 per article.

WordPress: a plugin that runs the gate before publish
Webflow, HubSpot, Ghost, Shopify: through their content APIs
Contentful, Sanity, Strapi: a webhook on the publish action
Astro, Hugo, Jekyll, Next.js: a check on every pull request
anything else: Markdown or HTML handoff with the gate report
30 days of questions answered by me

Book the install

What you can hire

Three ways in. One is a blunt half-day, two are retainers.

The audit is priced so nobody needs a call to find out their last agency sold them air. The retainers are for teams that want the citation pool worked on every month.

From /reports/reddit-ai-visibility-study/

Machine-generated as well. The workflow drew this from the correlation table inside the article: 0.73 between Reddit backlinks & ChatGPT mentions across 9 vendors, falling to -0.11 once company size is held constant. Company size does the work; the Reddit links ride along with it.

Retainer · cited-domain links

Links from domains AI answers already cite

from 5placements / month

I pull the domains that ChatGPT, Gemini & AI Overviews cite for your money queries (Surfer's AI tracker, DataForSEO, Ahrefs), vet each linking page with the nine traffic checks plus the citation check, and do the outreach myself. You get a page-level report with a URL you can open, in place of a DR column.

5 to 15 placements a month; faster is a red flag
15 to 20% cold response rate, one follow-up
each placement approved by me

Get a quote

Retainer · content engine

Pages built to be the source an AI answer quotes

quoteper month

The workflow that took marketintelligencetools.com to 14,459 Copilot citations a week: model-drafted, each number checked against its source, vendor pricing with real figures or a marked buyer-reported median, one chart per claim, written to be extractable. Run on your domain, under your byline.

rankings, reviews, comparisons, reports
re-validated twice a year
internal linking & schema included

See a sample brief

Fixed price · half day

Post-contractor audit

500 PLNabout $125

Send the last link report. I open every linking URL & tell you what the previous agency or freelancer did versus what they charged for. Now with a column that says if any of those domains is cited by an AI answer for anything at all.

page-level traffic, cache date, internal links
outbound link volume by niche
plain-language verdict per link

Book the audit

Method

Ten checks on the exact linking URL. The domain never gets the benefit of the doubt.

A few minutes per link. I've run it on a few thousand, which is how I can tell in one look if a link is an asset, a liability, or a receipt.

From /reports/reddit-ai-visibility-study/

Machine-generated as well, from Surfer's 57,253-URL dataset quoted in the article: 67.82% of AI Overview citations sit outside Google's top 10 for the query. Ranking checks miss two thirds of the pool; the tenth check exists for that reason.

$ vet surferseo.com/blog/is-chatgpt-a-search-engine/

open exact URL200, indexed

page-level US traffic2,900/mo

last Google cache6 days ago

internal links to page31

outbound linked domains14, all SEO/marketing

ref : linked domain ratio4.2 : 1

shared hosting w/ ref domainsnone

12-month traffic trend+18%

copy written for humansyes

AI citation check (DataForSEO)ChatGPT ×9, Gemini ×4 (7d)

verdict place DR 84 is the least interesting number here.

$ vet techdigestdaily.net/best-crm-software-2026/

open exact URL200, indexed

page-level US traffic0/mo

last Google cache7 months ago

internal links to page0 (orphan)

outbound linked domains50,300, casino + pharma

ref : linked domain ratio0.1 : 1

shared hosting w/ ref domainsyes, 38 domains, 1 IP

12-month traffic trend-91%

copy written for humansno, anchor-stitched

AI citation check (DataForSEO)0 mentions, any model

verdict reject DR 85. Sold to someone for $300 last month.

The nine traffic checks are the ones I've published & run since 2020. The tenth is new, and it changes which domains win.

Open the exact linking URL. Skip the homepage.
Page-level traffic and the keywords driving it, filtered to that one URL.
Indexation and cache date. A months-old cache means Google barely visits.
Internal links pointing at the page from elsewhere on the site.
The surrounding copy. Written for humans, or stitched around an anchor.
Outbound links on the domain, counted by volume & read by niche.
Referring-to-linked domain ratio. 3:1 or better.
Shared IP or hosting with other referring domains, the usual PBN tell.
Traffic trend over time. A chart in freefall beats the snapshot.
Does an AI answer cite this domain for anything in your category, in the last 7 days? Pulled from Surfer's AI tracker (which pages an AI answer shows for a phrase), DataForSEO LLM mention data & Ahrefs, per domain, per query. Clarity only reports on my own pages, so it stays out of this check.

From /reports/subscription-based-car-features/

Two-track timeline, 2019 to 2026. Five programs launched & stayed; two reversals, neither of them a law.

From /reports/iqvia-veeva-lawsuit/

Who feeds what under the August 2025 access agreements. Amber one way, green the other.

How the figures get made

The loop each page goes through. A failed gate sends the paragraph back to the claim, so the fix is a sourced fact, never a softer word.

Jan Suski · Nowy Żmigród, Podkarpackie, PL · since 2020

Who does the work

One person opens every URL. That person is me.

Six years of SEO & link building for tech companies through Chilli Fruit Web Consulting and Linkhouse, plus Brand24 client work going back to 2021, which Brand24 turned into a published case study. Past a dozen SaaS clients bought the writing ghostwritten: several hundred articles under someone else's name, many still in the top 10 years later.

Under my own name the bylines run at Surfer, Senuto, Brand24, RankTracker & Vivian Agency. The marketing press has quoted the work at PRNews, Strat Communications, SEOptimer & GOBankingRates via Yahoo Finance. I run r/marketinteltools and made the same argument on SEO Boardroom's link-building episode: check the number before you publish it.

The habit this whole site runs on is the same one: open the page, find where the number came from, see if the claim survives a look at the source. Longer pieces live on the blog.

SurferBrand24SenutoRankTrackerVivian AgencyPRNewsStrat CommunicationsSEOptimerGOBankingRatesYahoo FinanceInfluencerMarketingHubSEO BoardroomGood Men Project SurferBrand24SenutoRankTrackerVivian AgencyPRNewsStrat CommunicationsSEOptimerGOBankingRatesYahoo FinanceInfluencerMarketingHubSEO BoardroomGood Men Project

Start here

Send a domain. I'll tell you if any AI answer has cited it this week.

Free, no call, no deck. The check runs on DataForSEO LLM mentions & Surfer's AI tracker, so it works on any domain. If the answer is "none", you get a short note on which cited domains in your category are reachable & what a placement there would take. If the profile is full of junk, I'll say so plainly. That's usually the point.

Score one placement from your last link report against the checks · backlink quality scorer
Paste your anchor list and see if the mix reads earned or engineered · anchor text scorer
Check when Google last crawled the page your link sits on · page freshness checker