Cited.
A Free Field Manual for Marketing in the Citation Era
Ninety-three per cent of AI Mode is zero-click. That is the architectural fact every marketing function is now operating against — whether the strategy deck has caught up or not. The unit of value has shifted from rank to citation, from click to extraction, from keyword to fragment. The shift is not coming. It is here.
I have spent the last year watching this conversation play out inside marketing organisations. The pattern is identical. A team asks how to recover lost clicks. The question is wrong before it finishes. The click was the tax retrieval used to charge — and retrieval has changed. Rebuilding traffic infrastructure for an outcome the architecture has eliminated is the most expensive mistake a senior marketer can make in 2026.
So I wrote a manual (with my team of agents, of course).
Why this is a manual, not another book
The Agentic CMO — the second edition coming in June — makes the strategic argument: marketing organisations that orchestrate human and artificial intelligence as a unified force will outcompete those that adopt AI as a tool stack. Cited is the discipline that argument depends on. It is the field kit. The book argues; the manual operates.
Cited is built for the senior manager doing the delivery — SEO/GEO, content, analytics, brand, marketing operations. Fifteen chapters, nine appendices, three governing questions in every chapter: what carries over from SEO, what is genuinely new, and what you do Monday morning. The chapter pattern repeats deliberately so it can sit open on a second monitor while you audit a robots.txt, fix an Entity Bible, or push back on a vendor pitch.
What’s inside:
A continuity map of the eight SEO disciplines — what carries over to GEO, what re-weights, and where the agency proposal is double-charging you for work you already own.
The dual-layer citation model — direct citation versus indirect ranking inheritance — and the schema misconception that has cost the industry two years of misallocated budget.
A field guide to six engines — Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic Claude, and the Gemini/Meta AI/Grok long tail — each with its retrieval stack, citation logic, and paid-placement reality.
A crawler portfolio framework — robots.txt, ai.txt, llms.txt — set against the post-July-2025 Cloudflare default-block reality and a register of the crawlers worth knowing by name.
The Entity Bible — eight platforms in priority order, the Wikidata canonical fields, and the sameAs graph that resolves you as one entity across engines.
A measurement discipline that doesn’t require a vendor — fixed prompt battery, citation-share dashboard, honest limits on what attribution still cannot do — followed by a 90-day playbook and an operating-model spec for who owns what.
The bias is against hype. Roughly eighty per cent of classical SEO carries over to GEO with re-weighting; Chapter 2 names which agencies are charging premium rates to rebuild work organisations already own. Chapter 5 corrects the schema misconception that has cost the industry two years of misallocated budget. Chapter 8 puts YouTube and multimodal where the evidence says they belong, not where most marketing programmes pretend they do. The manual ends with a chapter named What We Don’t Yet Know — because some of the most consequential questions in this field are not settled, and pretending otherwise would waste your reading time.
Every empirical claim carries an evidence weight inline: Strong, Moderate, Anecdotal, Theoretical. Vendor-funded data is flagged at first reference. The source canon, in Appendix G, lists every reference with funder, sample size, and replication status. Where the canon disagrees, the disagreement is named — not smoothed.
Why now
The manual is the answer to a question I’ve been asked too often to keep answering one CMO at a time: where do I start? Cited starts at the audit, runs through the engines, and lands at the operating model. It assumes you are the senior manager who has to make the work happen.
Two questions worth sitting with this week. Is your weekly dashboard headlined by traffic or by citation? And of the eight SEO disciplines on the continuity map, how many are passing today — and how many is your agency about to charge you to rebuild?
Cited is at the-agentic-cmo.com/cited.
Also available in Kindle format at a nominal price here.
The price is zero. The work it asks you to do is not.