AI SEO & Business Automation Podcast

James Dooley: Listical link building for Google Gemini AI overviews.

I do not know if you have been seeing this, unless you have been hiding under a rock, but every search nowadays seems to show an AI overview.

This is powered by Gemini, and a lot of people are now asking how they can get their brand mentioned or cited inside Gemini.

Today I'm joined with Jabez Reuben, who does a lot of listical link building.

So I want to jump straight in and ask, does listical link building help you get cited better in Gemini AI overviews?

Jabez Reuben: 100% yes.

Right now, with all our tests and all the publications we have been doing, listicles are what get cited the most.

James Dooley: With regards to listicles, building these listicles on third-party corroborative sources, is it as easy to get cited in Gemini as it is in ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity?

How difficult is it to get brands cited inside Gemini?

Jabez Reuben: From all our tests and campaigns that we have been running, it is fairly easy and faster to rank in Gemini and Claude compared to ChatGPT.

James Dooley: So ChatGPT is taking a little bit longer to get picked up than Claude and Gemini?

Jabez Reuben: Yes.

James Dooley: With regards to getting these listicles cited inside Gemini, people used to be obsessed with link building metrics like DA, DR, citation flow, traffic and PageRank.

Do you care about any of that, or are you happy if the listicle ranks in the top 10 of Google search results?

Jabez Reuben: From our tests, and I am not giving a hypothetical theory here, we have seen citations from listicles published on DR20 and DR30 sites with 500 or 1,000 traffic getting cited in Gemini consistently.

So we are not too bothered about DA or traffic.

The most important thing we check is that these sites are not blocking any LLM crawlers.

We also make sure that the articles get indexed quickly, because if the article is not indexed on Google, then Gemini will not surface your citations.

James Dooley: You mentioned making sure they are not being blocked.

How do you check whether the website you are going to publish the listicle on is blocking Gemini or not?

If it is blocking Gemini specifically, are you then avoiding those websites?

Jabez Reuben: Yes.

The easiest way right now, if you have an inventory of sites you can access, is to check them in bulk.

We have made a Claude skill that checks the robots.txt file across all the sites and identifies whether any LLM crawlers are blocked.

From there, we can filter them out. It is pretty fast and easy.

James Dooley: You mentioned that you're not too fussed about DR, DA and all the rest of it.

So first and foremost, it needs to be crawled, indexed and ideally ranking in the top 10 or top 20 results.

Are you making certain that you're writing well-formatted content?

With these listicles, are you treating them like money page articles and formatting them with bullet points, numbered lists, videos and images?

How far are you going to make sure these listicles come right?

Jabez Reuben: Just a quick thing regarding site selection.

If you can get access to bigger sites and more niche-relevant sites, great. Go ahead.

We have seen results come a bit faster with those.

But do not stress about only going after premium and hyper-relevant sites.

When it comes to writing, I think 50%, 60% or even 70% of the game is about how well structured your listicle is.

You need proper bullet points at the start, key takeaways, comparison tables, proper H2s with your target brand and your competitors, and competitors that are identified as key entities in your niche.

You also need FAQs.

Do some research into semantic articles, the style of writing, semantic triplets, quadgrams and how other semantic structures work.

If you are struggling to understand semantic writing, feed that into Claude and it will help you write better articles.

Make it as structured as possible.

Use internal linking, link out to authority articles, reference authority posts, add YouTube videos, media, infographics and as much detail and structure as you can.

That will help it get indexed first, then rank better, and eventually start ranking better in Gemini.

James Dooley: I think the number one problem people have with getting listicles to rank in Google Gemini AI overviews is that they create one listicle and think that is good enough.

It might rank, but you still need to build consensus.

For anyone listening or watching this, can you explain the importance of consensus, what it means, and why it is really important for listical link building to get cited in Google Gemini AI overviews?

Jabez Reuben: You need to understand that Gemini, as an LLM, has way more intelligence than a regular Google algorithm.

The goal is for them to reach AGI status.

These LLMs, including Gemini, are trying to think like humans.

Think about how humans view any brand.

If there is a newly launched brand and it has not won consensus locally, citywide or statewide, you will not see that brand as a great nationwide performer.

It is the same with LLMs.

If you do not have coverage locally, for suburbs or neighbourhoods, none of the LLMs, including Gemini, will rank you for nationwide keywords or nationwide terms.

You have to build consensus locally, then citywide, statewide and eventually nationwide.

Then LLMs, and Gemini specifically, will identify your brand as one of the top recommendations for nationwide keywords and start ranking you for nationwide keywords as well.

James Dooley: For sure.

Jabez, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on.

Make sure you check out the links in the description for how to rank with listicles in ChatGPT and Claude AI.

It is crazy how well Jabez is getting these listicles ranking across all the different LLMs.