Capstone 7: AI Citation Campaign
Goal: Engineer at least 3 Reddit threads or comments for AI-citation surface visibility (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews) targeting named queries, then verify actual citation pickup.
Prerequisite stages: 02-stage2-reddit-seo-ai-citations.md in full.
Weekly milestones: Week 1 select target queries and draft comprehensive, quotable answer-style content; Week 2 publish; Week 3 check citation pickup by running the target queries against all three engines; Week 4 write a risk memo on citation volatility.
Deliverables: 3+ published citation-oriented posts/comments; before/after citation-check screenshots across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews for each target query; a written volatility memo covering Conductor's documented 23% single-month citation-share drop and Perplexity's roughly 86% citation-share collapse following Reddit's lawsuit against it (both CMSWire).
| Criterion | Points |
|---|---|
| Query and content targeting quality | 20 |
| Publication execution | 15 |
| Citation verification evidence (dated screenshots, not claims) | 30 |
| Volatility risk analysis (names the specific documented swings) | 20 |
| Ethics, automatic fail on any vote/account manipulation or undisclosed multi-account activity, per the CMSWire 1,000-account black-hat case this course explicitly forbids | 15 |
| Total | 100 |
Claude workflows: draft comprehensive, citation-worthy comments with Claude; use Claude to run and summarize the citation-check queries across engines on a repeatable schedule.
Tools: Claude, ChatGPT/Perplexity/Google AI Overview access, Reddit.