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Third-Party Source Placement

For recommendation and comparison questions, assistants lean on sources that read as independent: listicles, review aggregators, forum threads, industry directories. Optimising your own site harder moves none of that, because your site was never in the citation set to begin with. The work is to find which pages are in it and to be accurately represented there.

CATEGORY
AI search (GEO)
FORMAT
third-party-source-placement.md
STEPS
7
PRICE
Free - no account
WHEN TO REACH FOR THIS

Use when assistants answer your category confidently but cite roundups, forums and review sites rather than any vendor page, including yours.

The skill file

third-party-source-placement.md 
---
name: third-party-source-placement
description: Use when assistants answer your category confidently but cite roundups, forums and review sites rather than any vendor page, including yours.
---

# Third-Party Source Placement

For recommendation and comparison questions, assistants lean on sources that read as independent: listicles, review aggregators, forum threads, industry directories. Optimising your own site harder moves none of that, because your site was never in the citation set to begin with. The work is to find which pages are in it and to be accurately represented there.

## What you need first

- The 15-25 buyer questions you already track for citations
- The cited URLs recorded from those runs, at least two rounds apart so one-off variation is visible
- A list of every place you are currently listed, reviewed or discussed
- Named owners for publisher outreach, review platforms and community accounts

## Method

1. Collect the cited URLs across every question and every assistant, then count appearances by domain. A short list of sources usually carries most of the answers in a category, and that list is the actual target.
2. Sort the recurring sources into three groups: ones you can be added to, ones where you appear but are described wrongly, and ones you will never influence. Only the first two are work.
3. Fix the wrong descriptions before chasing new placements. A stale feature list or a two-year-old price on a frequently cited source is doing active damage and usually costs one email.
4. For sources you are missing from, read the stated inclusion basis before pitching. Most roundups have one, and a pitch that ignores it gets nothing and burns the contact.
5. Where the source is a community thread, answer the question asked with the vendor badge visible. Undisclosed accounts get detected and screenshotted, and the resulting thread joins the citation set.
6. Judge the result on whether the cited URL set changed, not on traffic. The citation set is what you set out to alter, and most of these sources send little referral traffic even when they drive the answer.
7. Re-count the source list quarterly, because the pages assistants lean on shift as those pages are themselves rewritten and re-ranked.

## What this produces

A ranked table of third-party domains by citation frequency in your category, with an action per source and the observed outcome after each correction.

## Where this goes wrong

- Paying for a listing on a source that never appears in the citation set, which is the default outcome when nobody counted first
- Posting under an undisclosed account, which usually surfaces and leaves a thread about your astroturfing in the corpus
- Correcting a source once and never re-checking, so the old description returns at the publisher next refresh
- Reading a citation as proof that the source drives sales, when it drives the answer, which is a different and smaller claim

---

From the QuQi skill library - https://www.quqi.io/skills/third-party-source-placement
Free to download · no account, no email

What you need first

  • The 15-25 buyer questions you already track for citations
  • The cited URLs recorded from those runs, at least two rounds apart so one-off variation is visible
  • A list of every place you are currently listed, reviewed or discussed
  • Named owners for publisher outreach, review platforms and community accounts

Method

  1. 01 Collect the cited URLs across every question and every assistant, then count appearances by domain. A short list of sources usually carries most of the answers in a category, and that list is the actual target.
  2. 02 Sort the recurring sources into three groups: ones you can be added to, ones where you appear but are described wrongly, and ones you will never influence. Only the first two are work.
  3. 03 Fix the wrong descriptions before chasing new placements. A stale feature list or a two-year-old price on a frequently cited source is doing active damage and usually costs one email.
  4. 04 For sources you are missing from, read the stated inclusion basis before pitching. Most roundups have one, and a pitch that ignores it gets nothing and burns the contact.
  5. 05 Where the source is a community thread, answer the question asked with the vendor badge visible. Undisclosed accounts get detected and screenshotted, and the resulting thread joins the citation set.
  6. 06 Judge the result on whether the cited URL set changed, not on traffic. The citation set is what you set out to alter, and most of these sources send little referral traffic even when they drive the answer.
  7. 07 Re-count the source list quarterly, because the pages assistants lean on shift as those pages are themselves rewritten and re-ranked.

What this produces

A ranked table of third-party domains by citation frequency in your category, with an action per source and the observed outcome after each correction.

Where this goes wrong

  • Paying for a listing on a source that never appears in the citation set, which is the default outcome when nobody counted first
  • Posting under an undisclosed account, which usually surfaces and leaves a thread about your astroturfing in the corpus
  • Correcting a source once and never re-checking, so the old description returns at the publisher next refresh
  • Reading a citation as proof that the source drives sales, when it drives the answer, which is a different and smaller claim

Use this skill in your own AI

The download is a plain markdown file with the name and trigger in its frontmatter. Where an assistant supports skills it can load itself, that frontmatter is what it reads to decide this one applies.

Claude Code Save it as ~/.claude/skills/third-party-source-placement/SKILL.md and Claude loads it on its own when what you are doing matches the trigger line. Put it in .claude/skills inside a project instead if the whole team should have it.
Claude Upload the file in the skills section of your settings. Once it is there it applies itself in any conversation where the trigger fits, so you do not have to remember it exists.
ChatGPT There is no skills format to install into, so paste the file contents into a Project instruction or a Custom GPT instead. It then applies to every chat in that project rather than only the one you paste it into.
Anything else Paste the markdown into the chat before your question. It works in any assistant, it just has to be pasted again each time.

Questions about this skill

When is this the work rather than more optimisation of my own site?

When assistants answer your category confidently but cite roundups, forums and review sites, and no vendor page at all. Optimising your own site harder moves none of that, because your site was never in the citation set. Recommendation and comparison questions lean on sources that read as independent, so those pages are the actual target.

What do I need in hand before starting?

The buyer questions you already track, the cited URLs recorded from at least two rounds so one-off variation is visible, a list of everywhere you are already listed or discussed, and named owners for publisher outreach, review platforms and community accounts. Skip the counting and you pay for a listing on a source that never appears in an answer.

What do I end up with, and which part gets used?

A ranked table of third-party domains by how often they are cited in your category, with an action against each and the outcome after every correction. The action split is three ways: sources you can be added to, sources where you appear but are described wrongly, and sources you will never influence. The wrong descriptions come first and usually cost one email.

What ruins this most often?

Posting in community threads under an undisclosed account. It surfaces, gets screenshotted, and the resulting thread about your astroturfing joins the corpus assistants read. Answer with the vendor badge visible instead. The quieter error is correcting a source once and never re-checking, so the old description returns at the publisher's next refresh.

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