In July, GPTZero went through four "thought leadership" reports from PwC Middle East and found fake footnotes, made-up claims and one citation that linked to ChatGPT. City AM reported that one 2025 report, "Transforming Governance," scored 100% AI-generated once its references were set aside. It said a PwC framework was in use by the governments of Denmark, Saudi Arabia, the US and Australia, and GPTZero found no public evidence of that.
PwC wasn't alone, as City AM noted KPMG and EY had similar problems this year. That's thought leadership content made to fill a calendar. So we wanted to know what the other kind looks like, the kind that people and AI engines actually quote. We asked ChatGPT and Google the questions buyers argue about, then sorted every source they cited.
What we asked, and what came back
On October 19, 2026, we ran 24 opinion questions through ChatGPT and Google's AI Overviews. They were the sort of questions a good thought piece tries to answer, like "will AI agents replace SaaS," "do return to office mandates work" and "is cold email dead." Then we sorted each cited source by hand.
| Source type | ChatGPT (96 sources) | Google AI Overviews (220 sources) |
|---|---|---|
| Original research (surveys, studies, analyst and government data) | 76% | 6% |
| Opinion pieces by named people (columns, LinkedIn articles, essays) | 2% | 28% |
| Company explainers and how-to posts | 8% | 35% |
| Forum threads, videos and social posts | 0% | 23% |
| News stories | 7% | 8% |
ChatGPT also cited four product home pages and two Google help pages. It named a research firm or publisher in the text of 22 of its 24 answers.
So the two engines want different things. ChatGPT quoted the number and whoever owned it. Google's AI Overviews quoted the take, and pulled it from Forbes columns, LinkedIn posts and YouTube.
Two engines, two kinds of quote
The return to office question shows the split well. ChatGPT cited a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics and a paper in Nature. Google's AI Overview opened with two Forbes contributor columns, two HR and consulting blogs and a YouTube video, and its answer leaned on the columns' view that office mandates are about control.
The B2B marketing question went the same way. For "what do experts predict for B2B marketing in 2027," ChatGPT cited 11 sources, all from Forrester, Gartner, IDC and McKinsey. The AI Overview cited a marketing agency's trends post, two YouTube videos and two vendor blogs.
So a piece aimed at both needs a number with an owner and a view someone would argue with, and the steps further down cover each part.
200+ SaaS teams already track their AI citations.
They know exactly when ChatGPT mentions their brand, and when it stops. Do you?
The echo credit problem
One answer surprised us more than the rest. For "does thought leadership influence B2B buying decisions," ChatGPT cited the Edelman-LinkedIn research five times. Google's AI Overview gave its stats block, including a "61% to 88%" range, to a Facebook post and a fractional CMO's blog that had repeated survey numbers.
We call this echo credit. Your number travels, and the page that repeated it gets the citation. In this case the original lived in a PDF, while the copies were ordinary web pages.
The fix is to make your own page the easiest place to quote from. Put the finding on an open web page as well as in any download. Write it as one sentence with the number, who found it and when, so anyone repeating it has to name you. Our guide to statistics and data roundup posts covers how to format numbers so they get lifted with their source.
What people link to
AI citations are half the picture. People quote you by linking, so we pulled the number of sites linking to each page the two engines cited.
The research pages had a median of about 39 linking sites. The opinion pieces had a median of 1. Company explainers and news stories had a median of 2. About half the research pages had 50 or more linking sites, against 11% of opinion pieces.
Big names skew that, since Gartner and Pew earn links for being Gartner and Pew. So we looked only at research published by ordinary companies, like Recurly's subscription report and ProductLed's growth benchmarks. Those 22 pages still had a median of about 20 linking sites, twenty times the opinion pieces.
A larger study points the same way. Foundation, a B2B content agency, checked 12,154 pages from 24 B2B brands and found thought leadership made up 37% of pages but earned 27.5% of links. Nearly half of those pieces drew fewer than 50 linking sites. Statistics pages were 1% of pages and earned 4.1% of links.
The same study found consulting firms got a median 305 linking sites per thought leadership piece, against 126 for SaaS brands. That gap matters for a smaller company, because opinion pieces mostly earn links for brands people already follow.
How often does ChatGPT mention your brand?
Most founders have no idea. The answer might surprise you.
What buyers say they want
None of this means opinion is useless. The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report surveyed 1,934 US executives in March and April 2025. It focused on "hidden" buyers, the finance, legal and operations people who sign off on a purchase but rarely talk to sales.
Just over half of them, 55%, said they use thought leadership to vet vendors. That matters because 71% said they have little or no contact with sales, so content may be the only thing of yours they see.
They also told Edelman what they like. About 86% wanted ideas that challenge their assumptions, and 65% preferred a human, less formal tone over an intellectual one.
One caveat is worth stating. Edelman ran the survey with LinkedIn, among LinkedIn members, and LinkedIn sells the ad formats that carry this content. Take the direction seriously and the exact percentages less so.
How to write thought leadership that gets quoted
Here's the recipe we'd use, built from what both engines and both studies rewarded.
- Pick a question people argue about. Our 24 questions are a good model. Each has two sides and a buyer who cares about the answer.
- Bring one number nobody else has. Survey 50 customers, count something public, or rerun a test like ours. Small is fine if the method is clear.
- Write the finding as one sentence with the claim, the number, the source and the date. That sentence is what ChatGPT lifts and what other writers paste.
- Take a side. In an r/b2bmarketing thread on whether thought leadership is just content marketing, one reply put the test well. It needs a position you'd defend in a room where people disagree with you.
- Put a real person's name on it, with a byline that shows why they know. Our post on building expert bylines AI trusts covers what that bio needs.
- Publish it on one open, dated page with the method underneath. Then cut the LinkedIn version, since Google's AI Overviews pulled from LinkedIn posts again and again. Our LinkedIn post framework shows how to write it.
If you don't have data of your own, borrow expertise instead. Our guide to interviewing experts for content that gets cited shows how to turn a 30-minute call into quotes worth repeating.
Write in a human voice
The same r/b2bmarketing thread had a quieter complaint that rang true. One marketer said legal edits pull the point out of every draft, so by sign-off it reads like a policy update and nobody downloads the PDF.
People asking for good examples in r/content_marketing said much the same. The posts they liked shared mistakes, unpopular opinions backed by real experience and lessons from a recent decision.
Best examples for thought leadership posts on Linkedin.
Anyone can suggest good examples on posts from CEO as thought leader that’s really good and gets traction. Not the corporate reporting - real content that people would relate to, comment, etc. Your favorites?
That lines up with the Edelman survey too, where 57% of hidden buyers said they'd take quick takeaways over academic depth.
Check every footnote before it ships
AI can help draft a thought piece. The PwC reports show where it goes wrong when nobody checks. GPTZero found only 10 of 17 references in one report actually matched footnotes in the text, and one citation pointed at ChatGPT itself.
So before anything goes out, have a person open every link and confirm it says what you claim. Any statement about your customers, your product or a client's results needs a source you can show. PwC Middle East told City AM it was updating a limited number of supporting citations in the reports.
What this takes each month
Here's a rough monthly budget for one quotable piece, by my estimate.
| Task | Hours a month |
|---|---|
| Pick the question and design the data pull | 2 to 3 |
| Collect and check the data | 6 to 10 |
| Draft, with the expert's input | 4 to 6 |
| Fact-check every source | 2 to 3 |
| LinkedIn and social versions | 2 to 3 |
| Check who quotes and links to it | 1 to 2 |
| Total | 17 to 27 |
Foundation's study made the same point about that last row, since most teams never go back and count the links. Once a piece is live, you need to know whether ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google cite it, and that changes week to week.
Doing it yourself or handing it off
You can run all of this by hand. Or RankControl can do much of it every month, while you bring the data and the opinions only you have. It plans and writes articles from your brand profile and publishes them to your site once you approve. Each week it also checks 50 of your buyer questions on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Google AI Mode, and shows whether each engine named or cited you.
15 hours a week manually. Or 15 minutes with RankControl.
Track citations, monitor competitors, and fix content gaps across every AI search engine. Automatically.
