Drew Dorenfest of Client Magnet CRM has been doing this for about a year, which he mentioned with some self-deprecation early on. It has not stopped him giving one of the cleanest mechanical explanations of AI citation behaviour anyone has offered on the show.
Cite Your Sources So The Crawler Can Check
“The key to getting cited is to cite your sources.”
Drew Dorenfest, Client Magnet CRM
It sounds like a truism until you follow the mechanism through. The citation is not a reward for good writing. It is the output of a check that succeeded.
“Linking outward to IRS.gov and other authoritative sources signals verifiability to crawlers and LLMs.”
Drew Dorenfest
Outbound links to primary records are not traffic leakage in this model. They are the evidence.
How Verification Turns Into Citation
“When crawlers come and cross-reference your information against those sources and verify them, they go: okay, this company is legitimate, has been around for ten years, has great reviews — I will treat this as an authoritative source.”
Drew Dorenfest
Three stages. You publish a claim with a named source. A crawler follows the source and compares. The comparison resolves into a judgement about the page and, over repetition, about the entity behind it.
The corollary is uncomfortable for a lot of content programmes: an unsourced claim is not neutral. It is a check that cannot be run.
Where CRM Data Fits The Trust Picture
Dorenfest’s day job is a CRM, and his view of measurement follows from it. Conversions are the metric he cares about, because they are the one a business owner can feel — more sales, more emails, more calls. Traffic, in his framing, is pleasant but not felt.
That is not a separate topic from citations. The same verifiable operating history that makes a business credible to a crawler — years in operation, review volume, consistent records — is generated by actually running the business well and recording it.
He also frames the timescale honestly: build things brick by brick, expect compounding rather than overnight results, and let it turn into a flywheel.
The Practical Rewrite Drew Recommends
Take an existing article. Highlight every sentence that asserts a fact, a number or a comparison. Each highlight is a slot that either has a named, checkable source or does not. Fill the ones that do not, starting with the introduction, because that is the part most likely to be excerpted.
Related conversations from the show: AI and the future of search, brand and entity visibility, and Federico Fancinelli on ranking entities rather than pages.
