James Dooley: Listical link building for Google Gemini AI overviews.
I don't know if you've been seeing this, unless you've been hiding under a rock. Every single search nowadays seems to pop up with an AI overview. This is powered by Gemini, and a lot of people are now starting to ask 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.
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've been doing, listicles are what get cited the most.
James Dooley: With regards to listicles, so 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've 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 obsess over link building metrics like DA, DR, Trust Flow, Citation Flow, traffic numbers and PageRank instead of whether the page actually ranked.
Do you bother with any of that? Or are you simply happy if the listicle ranks in the top 10 of Google search results?
Jabez Reuben: From our tests, and I am not giving hypothetical theories here, I am only talking about what we have seen ourselves, we have seen citations from listicles published on DR20 and DR30 sites with 500 or 1,000 visitors a month getting cited in Gemini constantly.
So we are not bothered about DA or traffic.
The most important thing we check is that the sites are not blocking LLM crawlers. Then we make sure the articles get indexed quickly because if the article is not indexed on Google, Gemini will not surface your citations.
James Dooley: So with regards to that, you mentioned checking whether sites are blocking LLM crawlers. How do you check whether the website you're trying to publish a listicle on is blocking Gemini?
If it is blocking Gemini specifically, are you then avoiding posting on those websites?
Jabez Reuben: Yes.
The easiest way right now is if you have an inventory of sites you have access to, or even if you're checking one by one, you can make a Claude skill to scan all the robots.txt files and check if any of the sites are blocking LLM crawlers.
From there, we can filter them out. So it is pretty fast and easy.
James Dooley: You mentioned that you're not really bothered about DR or DA.
As long as it ranks and indexes, first and foremost it has to be crawled, then indexed, and ideally ranking in the top 10 or top 20 results.
Are you making sure the content itself is well formatted? With these listicles, are you treating them like money pages with bullet points, numbered lists, videos and images?
How far are you going to make sure these listicles rank?
Jabez Reuben: Just a quick point regarding site selection. If you can get access to bigger sites and more niche-relevant sites, then great. We have seen results come even faster from those.
But do not stress about only going after premium or hyper-relevant sites.
When it comes to writing, I think 50 to 70% of the game is about how well you structure your listicles.
You need proper bullet point summaries at the start, key takeaways, comparison tables and proper H2 headings with your target brand and your competitors, especially competitors already identified as key entities in your niche.
You should include FAQs and understand semantic writing styles. Learn how semantic triplets, quadgrams and related structures work.
If you struggle with semantic writing, you can feed examples into Claude and it will help you write better articles.
Make the article as structured as possible. Use internal links, outbound authority links, references to authority posts, YouTube videos, media and infographics.
The more detail and structure you add, the more likely it is to index quickly, rank better and eventually perform better in Gemini.
James Dooley: I think the number one problem some people have with getting listicles ranking in Google Gemini AI overviews is that they create one listicle and think that is enough.
It ranks, but they still do not get cited because they have not built enough consensus.
For anyone watching or listening, can you explain the importance of consensus, what it means and why it matters for listical link building in Google Gemini AI overviews?
Jabez Reuben: You need to understand that Gemini, as an LLM, has far more intelligence than a regular Google algorithm.
The goal is for these systems to move towards AGI-level intelligence. Gemini and other LLMs are trying to think more like humans.
Think about how people view a newly launched brand. If that brand has not built local or regional consensus, people will not see it as a nationwide authority.
The same applies to LLMs.
If you do not have coverage locally, across suburbs, neighbourhoods and cities, then Gemini and other LLMs will not rank you for nationwide terms.
You need to build consensus locally first, then citywide, statewide and eventually nationwide.
Once that happens, Gemini will identify your brand as one of the top recommendations for nationwide keywords and start ranking you for those nationwide terms 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 regarding 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.
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