Listicle Link Building For Google Gemini AI Overview (James Dooley Interviews Jabez Reuben)

James Dooley: Listicle link building for Google Gemini AI overviews. I do not know if you have been seeing this, unless you have been hiding under a rock. Every single search nowadays seems to pop up with the AI overview. This is powered by Gemini, and a lot of people are now starting to ask, how do I get my brand mentioned or cited inside Gemini? Today I am joined with Jabez Reuben, who does a lot of listicle link building. I want to jump straight in and ask, does listicle link building help you get cited better in Gemini AI overviews?

Jabez Reuben: One hundred per cent, yes. Right now, with all our tests and all the publications we have been doing, listicles are what get cited the most.

James Dooley: With regards to listicles, 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: For now, from all our tests and campaigns that we have 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 trying to get these listicles cited inside Gemini, people used to be obsessed with link building metrics like DA, DR, citation flow, or whether a website has at least 1,000 traffic. They were looking at PageRank as opposed to whether it was ranking. Do you bother about any of that? Or are you just thinking, if this listicle ranks in the top 10 of Google search results, I am happy?

Jabez Reuben: From our tests, and I am not giving a hypothetical theory here, I am talking about what we have seen in our tests. We have seen citations from listicles published on DR20 sites and DR30 sites with 500 traffic or 1,000 traffic get cited in Gemini left, right and centre. So we are not bothered about DA or traffic. The most important thing we check is that these sites should not block any of the LLM crawlers. They should also make sure the articles get indexed fast, because if the article is not indexed on Google, then Gemini will not surface your citations.

James Dooley: With regard to that, you mentioned making sure they are not being blocked. How do you check whether the website that you are going to post that listicle on, to try to get into Google Gemini AI overview, is blocking Gemini or not? If it is blocking Gemini specifically, are you then not posting on those websites?

Jabez Reuben: Yes. The easiest way right now is, if you have an inventory of sites that you have access to, or even if you are checking one by one, just make a Claude skill. We have made a Claude skill to go and check all the sites, the robots.txt file, and check if any of the sites have blocked any of the LLM crawlers. From there, we can filter them out. It is pretty fast and easy.

James Dooley: You mentioned that you are not really too fussed or bothered about DR, DA and all the rest of it. As long as it ranks, first and foremost, it has got to be crawled, indexed, and then ideally it has got to be ranking in the top 10 or the top 20 results. Are you then making sure that you are writing well-formatted content? With this listicle, are you taking time as if it is a money page type of article, formatting it with bullet points, numbered lists, videos and images? How far are you going with this to make sure these listicles come right?

Jabez Reuben: Just a quick thing regarding site selection. If you can get access to bigger sites or more niche-relevant sites, great. Go ahead. We have seen that results can come a bit faster with those. But do not stress about only going after premium and hyper-relevant sites. When it comes to writing, I think 50 to 60 per cent of the game, if not 70 per cent of the game, is about how well structured you write your listicles. You need proper bullet points at the start, like key takeaways, then comparison tables, then proper H2s with your target brand and your competitors. Those competitors are identified as key entities in your niche. You also need FAQs. Then do a bit of research on semantic articles, the style of writing, and understand how semantic triples, quadgrams and other things work. If you are struggling to understand the semantic way of writing articles, feed that into Claude and it will help you write better articles. But make it as structured as possible. Internal linking, linking out to authority articles, referencing authority posts, YouTube videos, media and infographics all help. The more detail and structure you can add, the more it will help you get indexed first, rank better and eventually start ranking better in Gemini.

James Dooley: For me, the number one problem that some people are having with getting listicles and putting them out to try and rank in Google Gemini overview is that they go and do one listicle and think that is good enough. It is ranking, but obviously you have got to build that consensus up. For anyone who is listening or watching this, can you explain the importance of consensus, what that means and why it is really important for listicle link building to get cited in Google Gemini AI overviews?

Jabez Reuben: You need to understand that Gemini, or any LLM, has way more intelligence than just your regular Google algorithm. The goal is for them to reach AGI status. These LLMs and Gemini are trying to think like humans. So how do humans think of any brand? Let us say there is a newly launched brand and it has not won its consensus locally, citywide or statewide. You will not see that brand as a great performer nationwide. It is the same with LLMs as well. If you do not have any coverage locally, for suburbs or for neighbourhoods, none of the LLMs, and even Gemini, will rank you for nationwide keywords or nationwide terms. So you have to build consensus locally, then citywide, statewide and eventually nationwide. Then these LLMs, and Gemini specifically, will identify your brand as the top recommendation for nationwide keywords and start ranking you for nationwide keywords as well.

James Dooley: Yes, for sure. Jabez Reuben, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on. Make sure to check out the links in the description with regards to how to rank with listicles in ChatGPT and also how to rank listicles for Claude AI. It is crazy how well Jabez Reuben is getting these listicles ranking in all the different LLMs.