Grounded in the work,
not the hype cycle.
Reach Works is a practice built on a career spent making content authoritative, structured and found — paired with primary research into how AI models decide what to cite.
Getting cited by AI isn't a growth hack. It's the problem newsrooms have always had — being authoritative, structured and legible to whatever decides what people see — pointed at a new reader that happens to be a machine.
That's the work Reach Works does, and we come at it from two directions at once. The mechanics of discovery — SEO, site architecture, structured markup and the audience analytics that show what actually moves — honed across national newsrooms including The Wall Street Journal and The Intercept. And primary research into how language models decide what to answer and cite.
The combination is the point. Plenty of shops can talk about AEO; we build the source-verification and claim-extraction tooling the structuring work runs on, and we test the advice against how the models actually behave — not how a blog post guesses they do. Reach Works is where all of it becomes a service.
Three things AEO needs. We've done all three for years.
Editorial authority & trust
A decade holding accuracy, sourcing and standards across two national newsrooms. E-E-A-T — experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust — isn't a checklist here; it was the daily job.
Structured, legible content
Making dense material machine- and human-legible — from Brookings policy briefs to a claim-extraction pipeline that turns arguments into records a model can quote.
Primary research on models
Ongoing research at the University of Amsterdam and published studies on how models answer, cite and represent — so the advice tracks how the systems actually behave, not how a blog post guesses they do.
What getting cited actually takes
The convictions the work runs on — the difference between watching a dashboard reassure you and becoming the source everything else gets built on.
- 01 Passages, not pagesAI doesn't judge your site; it judges the paragraph it might quote. We optimize the extractable answer section by section — which is why page-level SEO scores so often fail to explain a citation, win or lose.
- 02 Cited beats rankedRanking #1 no longer guarantees a mention. Being the source an answer names — accurately — is the outcome we design for, and it runs on different signals than a blue link ever did.
- 03 Rented reach is a tacticPlatforms reweight overnight — Reddit's share of ChatGPT citations swung roughly 86% in four days. We help you win the borrowed channels and build the authority no one can revoke on you.
- 04 Measured, not assumedWe test the advice against how models actually behave — one model is an opinion, several agreeing is a diagnosis. It's why we co-authored an empirical audit of how they answer, across Gemini and Claude.
- 05 Your content is an assetAI consumes publisher and brand content whether or not it pays for it. We treat that content as an asset — helping you see how it's used, set the terms, and open revenue paths through licensing, syndication and API access, instead of watching the value leak. It's why we contributed to the SPUR Content Telemetry open standard for reporting how AI systems use content.
Want that experience pointed at your visibility?
Start with an audit. See exactly where you stand in AI answers, and what the plan would be.