How Blank Spaces Grew AI Citations From 10 to 151

Overview

Blank Spaces is a digital wellness application that helps iPhone users reduce screen time and break the habit of compulsive phone use. The product has passed one million installations and serves a community of more than 300,000 people.

The category the company competes in is one that buyers research through recommendation lists rather than through brand search. Prospective users ask for the best screen time app, the best app blocker, or the best digital detox app, and they increasingly ask an AI assistant rather than a search engine. Blank Spaces needed to appear inside those answers.

LinkPanda ran a three-month campaign from 1 April to 30 June 2026 built entirely around high-authority listicle placements. Ten placements were secured across ten distinct referring domains at an average Domain Rating of 68. By the close of June, monthly AI citations had risen from 10 to 151, referring domains had grown from 140 to 465, and Domain Rating had climbed from 27 to 39.

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Campaign Strategy

Rather than pursuing volume, the campaign concentrated on the single placement type that is disproportionately effective for AI visibility: the ranked listicle.

Listicles, meaning roundup articles of the form "best screen time apps" or "top digital detox tools", are the exact documents that large language models retrieve and paraphrase when a user asks for a recommendation. Securing an entry inside those articles places the brand directly in the retrieval path rather than adjacent to it.

Every prospective domain was assessed against four standards before outreach began, and had to clear all four to enter the pipeline. The first was Domain Rating, with the majority of placements landing between DR 62 and DR 91. The second was genuine organic traffic, so that authority metrics were backed by real search visibility. The third, and the one that made the difference, was the host's existing AI citation footprint. The fourth was topical relevance, restricting placements to productivity, remote work and software review contexts where a screen time application belongs naturally.

The ten selected host domains carried a combined 16,099 domain citations of their own before the campaign began. Placing Blank Spaces inside content that AI models already read is what converted link acquisition into citation growth.

Campaign Results

Measured from the March 2026 baseline to the close of June 2026, after three months of activity.

Traffic figures are Ahrefs estimates as restated in the most recent report covering each period. The first placement went live on 8 April 2026.

May recorded a temporary drop in Google AI Overview and Gemini citations while those systems re-crawled and re-evaluated sources. The May placements were fully reflected in the June reporting period. Grok entered Ahrefs platform tracking in June 2026. Source: Ahrefs.

The Ten Placements

Every placement, with the host domain's authority metrics at the time of acquisition. Together the ten domains attracted approximately 411,800 monthly organic visits.

All metrics sourced from Ahrefs at the time of placement. Eleven individual placements were delivered across these ten domains, since fueler.io hosted both a contextual insertion in May and a listicle entry in June. Ahrefs identified flippingbook.com and tivazo.com as the strongest links earned during the campaign.

Strategy

Five decisions account for the majority of the outcome. Each one is repeatable on a comparable engagement.

1. Listicles Over Generic Guest Posts

   Ranked roundup articles are the document type AI assistants retrieve when a user asks for a recommendation. Concentrating on that single format placed the brand inside the retrieval path.

2. Hosts Vetted For Existing AI Citations

   Every candidate domain was screened for how frequently AI models already cited it. The ten selected hosts carried 16,099 domain citations between them, and that trust carried through to Blank Spaces.

3. Authority Concentration, Not Volume

   Ten placements at an average DR of 68 outperformed what a larger volume of lower-authority links would have achieved, and kept the backlink profile clean and defensible.

4. Consistent Monthly Cadence

   Placements were delivered in every month of the quarter rather than in a single batch. Steady link velocity supported the Domain Rating climb from 27 to 39 without any pattern that would appear artificial.

5. Measurement Built Around AI Visibility

   Reporting tracked citations per platform alongside conventional SEO metrics, and every live link was published to the client's LinkPanda App account through the LinkCard.

Conclusion

In a single quarter, a programme of ten carefully selected listicle placements moved Blank Spaces from near-invisibility in AI-generated answers to 151 monthly citations across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Grok and Perplexity. Referring domains grew by 232%, Domain Rating rose by twelve points, and organic traffic increased by 150%.

The result demonstrates a principle that applies well beyond this client. Generative engine optimisation is not a separate discipline from link building. It is link building aimed at the documents that AI models actually read. When placements are selected for the host's own citation footprint rather than for raw Domain Rating alone, authority and AI visibility grow together.

Blank Spaces has since continued the programme, and the trajectory has held. By August 2026 the site had reached a Domain Rating of 41 with 688 referring domains.

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