Securing AI Citations for a YMYL Health & Wellness Brand
An established digital publisher in the health and wellness space (a YMYL, or “Your Money Your Life” topic).
Challenges We Faced
As a YMYL site, the client faced extreme scrutiny from AI models and declining traffic:
Traffic Loss to AI Overviews
Core traffic from “what is [symptom]” or “benefits of [supplement]” was being lost to Google’s AI answers.
Not Cited by LLMs
Users on Perplexity and ChatGPT were getting health answers synthesized from major competitors (e.g., Healthline, WebMD).
Extreme E-E-A-T Scrutiny
AI models are trained to be extra cautious with YMYL content, and the client’s trust signals were weaker than competitors’.
Massive Legacy Content
10,000+ articles were not formatted for AI consumption (unclear, not factual, poor E-E-A-T).
Weak Semantic Structure
Content was not semantically clustered, making it hard for AI to see their deep topical authority in specific health verticals.
Get Your Products Cited by AI
“Want your products to appear in AI-driven recommendations? Check out our generative engine optimization services for e-commerce!”
Our Approach – How We Solved These Challenges
AI Overview Citation Strategy
Identified the top 100 “best [product] for [use case]” prompts and optimized category pages to answer them.
E-E-A-T & Entity Optimization
A massive push to link all content to expert authors (doctors, nutritionists) with detailed bios and Person schema.
We built out the brand’s “About,” “Editorial Policy,” and “Fact-Checking” pages to build verifiable trust.
LLM Content Optimization (at Scale)
Prioritized their top 500 articles and rewrote all introductions to be “source-primed”—clear, factual, and citable.
Semantic & Query Research
Re-organized all content into “semantic hubs” (e.g., “Cardiovascular Health,” “Mental Wellness”) to prove deep expertise to AI models.
Results
| Metric | Before | After | Growth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic Traffic | 75,000/mo | 110,000/mo | +47% |
| Brand Citations (in AI answers) | ~20 | 300+ | +1400% |
| Keywords in Top 10 | 4,000 | 9,500 | +137.5% |
Free GEO Analysis
“Not getting AI-driven traffic to your products? Request a Free GEO Analysis and find out why!”
Advice for Marketers & Brand Owners
- Optimize for all “answer engines,” not just Google. Understand the unique user intent on platforms like Perplexity.
- In YMYL niches, E-E-A-T is 90% of GEO. Prove your authors are experts and your brand is trustworthy with clear, linkable policies.
- Write for clarity, not just “for AI.” Simple, factual, and well-structured content wins.
- Semantic hubs are more important than ever for proving to AI that you have deep, not just wide, knowledge on a topic.
Extra Factors That Made It Work
- A clear editorial policy update to “write for clarity” and “facts-first.”
- The aggressive rollout of Person schema for all 50+ medical reviewers and authors.
- Monitoring brand citations on Perplexity and ChatGPT in addition to Google’s AI Overviews.
