Borrowed authority, under your name
Newsletter editions that put your answer on a domain with authority
Your own domain earns trust slowly. LinkedIn and Substack already have it, and an edition you publish there sits at a public, indexed URL under your name. The distribution to your network is the visible part. The durable part is a second place your answer exists, attributed to a person rather than a logo.
Every plan queries all 6. See how each engine picks who it names
What we measured
of B2B buyers now use AI somewhere in their buying process (Forrester, 2026), and the systems they use weigh how many independent places agree about you.
Engines queried
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot. Every plan, including the free one.
Answers kept
Every answer is stored word for word, so any number on your report can be checked against the text it came from.
The gap this closes
- A new domain has no track record and no shortcut changes that.
- Firms publish under a brand account, which accumulates nothing except posts.
- Writing an edition takes a morning nobody has, so the habit dies at issue four.
- Meanwhile the question your buyers ask is being answered today, by somebody else.
What you end up with
- Finished editions in a founder voice, drafted from your own scan findings.
- Attribution to a named person, which is what accumulates authority.
- A cadence that survives a busy month because the draft arrives written.
- The same argument as your written pages, on a platform that already has reach.
How it works
Three steps, and you only do the first one.
The subject comes from the scan
Each edition is drafted from the strongest finding in that scan: a buying question where an engine named somebody else, with the answer text attached. You are writing about something you can prove happened rather than something you thought of on the train.
The draft argues in your voice, under your name
It carries a point of view, a concrete example and a title phrased the way a buyer would ask the question, with one natural link back to the page on your site that answers it in full. You edit and publish; nothing goes out automatically.
The same brief feeds the other surfaces
The Reddit draft and the X thread come from the same brief, so the argument shows up in three places in the same week without being rewritten three times. That repetition across independent domains is the corroboration engines are checking for.
What you get on each plan
You get finished editions in a founder voice, drafted from the same scan findings as your written pages. This is what lands, per plan, with the monthly volume read live from the plan configuration.
Track
Free- No drafting, but the material an edition is built from
- The questions where a competitor was named
- The verbatim answers those engines gave
- A year of newsletter subjects in one report
- Next scan shows whether your editions moved anything
Fix
$99/mo- An edition per scan, drafted in a founder voice
- Built from that scan's strongest finding
- Title phrased the way a buyer would ask
- Natural link back to the matching page
- Arrives as a draft, because it publishes under your name
- LinkedIn, Reddit and X drafts from one brief
Dominate
$499/mo- Adds a periodic digest from your own scan findings
- What moved, what you started winning, who gained ground
- The edition argues, the digest reports
- Wider budget gives editions more to work with
- One idea runs on LinkedIn and Substack as two indexed articles
Rule
$1999/mo- Portfolio level, several founders publishing at once
- A person decides the angle each brand owns
- A guard keeps one brand out of another's edition
Which engine actually leans on this
Your row is Newsletters. The rest of the grid is on the engines page.
| Channel | ChatGPT | Claude | Perplexity | Gemini | Google AI Mode | Microsoft Copilot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your own site Schema, answer pages, llms.txt, crawlability | Heavy Vendor | Heavy Vendor | Heavy Measured | Heavy Our read | Heavy Vendor | Heavy Our read |
| Reviews and directories G2, Clutch, Capterra, Trustpilot, Google Business | Moderate Our read | Light Measured | Heavy Our read | Moderate Our read | Moderate Measured | Moderate Measured |
| Reddit and forums Unpaid opinion, where buyers go for the unvarnished view | Light Our read | Light Measured | Heavy Our read | Moderate Our read | Heavy Measured | Moderate Measured |
| Video YouTube. Only counts once there is a transcript | Moderate Our read | Light Our read | Moderate Our read | Heavy Our read | Heavy Measured | Light Measured |
| Newsletters LinkedIn, Substack, Beehiiv. Published under a named person | Moderate Our read | Light Our read | Moderate Our read | Heavy Our read | Heavy Measured | Light Our read |
| News and PR Earned coverage, wire pickup, journalist mentions | Heavy Vendor | Heavy Vendor | Heavy Our read | Moderate Our read | Moderate Our read | Moderate Our read |
Your own site. Your own site counts most for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot.
Reviews and directories. Reviews and directories counts most for Perplexity. It is a light signal for Claude.
Reddit and forums. Reddit and forums counts most for Perplexity, Google AI Mode. It is a light signal for ChatGPT, Claude.
Video. Video counts most for Gemini, Google AI Mode. It is a light signal for Claude, Microsoft Copilot.
Newsletters. Newsletters counts most for Gemini, Google AI Mode. It is a light signal for Claude, Microsoft Copilot.
News and PR. News and PR counts most for ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity.
Where this comes from
- OpenAI: publishers and developers FAQ States that a site must allow OAI-SearchBot to be eligible for ChatGPT search at all.
- OpenAI: introducing ChatGPT search The named publisher partnerships behind the news and PR row.
- Anthropic: web search tool documentation Citations are always enabled, and Claude only searches when a question needs current information.
- Google Search Central: AI features and your website AI Overviews and AI Mode report inside the ordinary Search Console Performance report.
- Search Console Help: impressions, position and clicks How AI Mode counts a click, and why a follow-up question is treated as a new query.
- Dan Petrovic: citation mining of OpenAI grounding metadata Reddit retrieved in 76 percent of OpenAI searches and selected 0.61 percent of the time.
- Our production scan database, read 12 August 2026 46 completed reports, 34 brands, 419 buying questions, 2,421 answered buying cells. Where the per-engine mention rates come from.
- Our 15-region managed services study 743 records, 566 named by an engine, and the per-engine corroboration rates.
- What our crawler finds on real sites 39 readable crawls: 38 with no llms.txt, 26 with no FAQ schema, 16 with no Organization schema.
- How we check an AI visibility report The method behind every first-party number on this page, including what it cannot show.
Engine behaviour moves month to month. This table is maintained, not published once.
The proof, including the parts that flatter nobody
We run this play on our own firm and publish the numbers it produces, which is the only reason we can describe it honestly. Across the 46 completed reports behind this page, the best any engine managed was naming the brand in 7.4% of the buying questions we put to it, and the others sat between 0.4% and 4.0%, on firms that arrived already suspecting they were missing.
What we cannot show you is a controlled result for platform publishing. We do not instrument LinkedIn or Substack, we cannot see which passage a system read, and we are not going to invent an attribution model to fill that hole. The measurable part is the question each edition argued, re-asked on all six engines, scan after scan.
Our published research is where the method behind those figures sits, including what it failed to establish.
Read the MSP AI Visibility Report 2026 →A worked example: an edition drafted from a scan
This is the skeleton of an edition written for a founder whose scan showed a rival named on four engines for a question about compliance coverage. The brand and the rival are illustrative. Everything structural is what a real draft carries.
Title and opening
- Title: Why the compliance question decides your shortlist before you get a call
- Opening: Last month I asked six AI engines who a 40-person accounting firm should hire for SOC 2 readiness. Four of them answered. None of them named us. Three named the same national provider, and one of those answers told me exactly why.
- Turn: The answer said to look for prior experience in professional services and a named compliance lead. We have both. We had never written either of them down anywhere a machine could read.
Body beats
- The criterion the engine stated, quoted in full, because it is the buyer's criterion and not ours.
- What we actually do about it, with the artefacts named: the evidence pack, the six-year log retention, the named lead per account.
- The uncomfortable part: this was true for two years and invisible for two years, which is a publishing failure rather than a service failure.
- One link to the page on our site that answers the question in full, with the FAQ block on it.
What comes with it from the same brief
- A Reddit draft that answers the same question in a community where it gets asked, with no link and no pitch.
- An X thread that makes the same argument in six posts, each one standing alone.
- The written page on your own domain, which is what all three of them point at.
The reason this edition works is that it reports something that happened rather than asserting something the author believes. It has a date, a method, a quote and an admission. Those four properties are also, by coincidence and not by coincidence, what makes a passage safe for a machine to quote.
How it actually works
The mechanism, for anyone who wants it. Open a card to read the detail.
What borrowed authority does, and what it does not
The mechanism is narrow and worth stating precisely. An edition on LinkedIn or Substack lives at a public URL that search systems index, on a domain whose reputation you did not have to build. When a system assembling an answer looks for a source on your topic, that page is a candidate in a way a three-month-old company blog is not.
Read the detail
The honest limit sits next to it. These platforms restrict a lot of automated reading, and how much any given system sees varies by platform and by bot. The value runs through the indexed page and through the corroboration it provides, so treat it as one of several places your answer exists rather than as a replacement for your own domain.
Which is why every edition links back. The link tells a reader, and anything reading over their shoulder, that the platform article and the page on your site are the same argument by the same firm. Each one makes the other more credible.
Author authority is the part that compounds
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust are not a ranking dial anyone can turn. They describe what a system is trying to approximate when it decides who to believe, and the approximation leans on whether a named person shows up repeatedly on a topic with work attached to their name.
Read the detail
A brand account cannot build that. A logo has no biography, no history of being right, and nothing that carries from one post to the next. A founder publishing under their own name accumulates all three, and the association transfers to the company, which is why the byline stays yours even when the draft did not start with you.
Consistency beats volume here by a wide margin. Two solid editions every month for a year builds a recognisable body of work. Eleven editions in March followed by silence builds an archive nobody associates with anything.
Two formats, two jobs
The edition is an argument. It takes one buying question, states a position, backs it with a real example, and links to the page that answers it in full. Its job is to exist on a second domain and to be the kind of thing somebody forwards.
Read the detail
The digest is reporting. It is built from your own scan findings and tells your subscribers what moved: the questions you started winning, the competitor that gained ground, the fix that landed. Publishing your own numbers is the format that keeps a B2B list subscribed, because it is the one thing a reader cannot get anywhere else.
Running both is what a serious programme looks like, and running one is what most firms can sustain. The plan table is honest about which tier drafts which, so the decision is yours before you buy rather than a surprise afterwards.
What it costs
Prices and monthly volumes below read from the live plan configuration, so this page cannot drift from what your account gets.
| Plan | Price | Questions | Scans |
|---|---|---|---|
| Track | Free | 5 | 1/mo |
| Fix | $99/mo | 10 | 4/mo |
| Dominate | $499/mo | 25 | 4/mo |
Rule is portfolio level and sales-assisted, and it fits a group where several founders publish under their own names.
See where you stand first
Run a free scan and find out which of these gaps you actually have.
Get your free auditFrequently asked questions
Do these actually help with AI citations?
The mechanism is corroboration rather than magic. An edition sits at an indexed URL on a domain with real authority, which gives your answer a second independent home. How much any given system reads varies by platform, so treat it as one source among several.
Why publish under my name and not the company?
Because a logo accumulates nothing. A named person publishing on one topic over time builds an association between that person, the topic and the firm, and that association is what a system leans on when it decides whom to believe.
Can my marketing person write and publish it?
Drafting, yes, which is what we do too. Publishing should stay under the founder's byline, because the compounding asset is the named human. A ghost-drafted, founder-reviewed edition gets the efficiency and the authority at once.
If I can only commit to one, LinkedIn or Substack?
LinkedIn for most B2B founders, since your buyers are already reading there and the domain works for you from the first issue. Choose Substack first if you want a subscriber list you own outright, with the email addresses in your hands.
I barely have any followers. Is it worth it?
The citation value does not come from your follower count. An indexed article is read by systems whether 40 people or 40,000 saw it in a feed. The audience compounds later; the retrievable footprint starts with the first issue.
How often should I publish?
Two editions every month, every month, beats a burst followed by silence. Consistency is what builds the association; volume without it builds an archive.
Sources and further reading
- Forrester B2B Buying Study 2026: 94% of B2B buyers use AI in the buying process; 2x now cite AI as a top information source.
- Kevin Indig, 30k-citation study (via G2): G2 holds ~22.4% share of voice for software queries; 10% more reviews correlates with ~2% more AI citations.
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