The spreadsheet has four hundred rows in it. Somebody on your team built it last week from a scrape, or it arrived attached to a proposal, and every row is a site that could one day mention your product.
You are looking at it trying to work out whether it is a plan.
The rows are the part that got easy. What got hard is the sentence you are about to send to the person who owns row eleven, and nothing in the spreadsheet will help you write it.
Your Category’s Reachable List Is Shorter Than Your Spreadsheet
Before anything else, find out how big the field is. It is smaller than the tooling implies, and knowing that changes what one email is worth.
We ran twenty buying queries across five software categories on 21 September 2026, took the top ten web results for each, and classified all two hundred of them by who owns the page. That is what a buyer meets when they search, which is a proxy for what an engine reads rather than a count of what it cited.
Nearly half of that field, 89 of the 200 results, sits on the domain of a vendor selling in the same category. Those pages will never carry you.
Strip them out, along with the communities and the video, and the reachable field across all five categories comes to 30 distinct domains. Per category it ran from four to fourteen.
Four to fourteen. That is the whole target list for a category, and you can build yours this afternoon by searching the four or five ways your buyers phrase the question and writing down who owns each result.
The three checks that shrink it further, correctly
A list this short is still too long, because a scrape returns candidates and a candidate is not a target. Three checks do the reducing, and all three are judgment rather than filtering.
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Two axes. Authority and real readers. A high-authority page nobody visits sends nobody, so a domain rating on its own has never been a reason to spend an ask.
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The relevance check. Citation research surfaces sources an engine reached for to support a minor claim, and those sources have nothing to do with your category. Somebody has to open each one and decide. The research does not pre-vet itself.
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The omission check. Where a page already lists players in your category and left you out, find out whether that was a criterion or an oversight. An oversight is the easiest yes in mention building, and it is the ask we see skipped most often.
Two blocks on that chart are not outreach targets, and they are not dead ground either. The communities are the other half of how Empact Partners defines Generative Engine Optimization, which we run on one formula: GEO = UGC + Mentions.
The formula means user-generated content, what real buyers say about you where anyone can read it, plus the places independent sources name you. The mentions half is outreach, and it is the half these checks are for. The UGC half is where buyers talk to each other, and Reddit is the most cited source we track.
Finding the Sources Got Easy. Finding the Person Did Not.
Here is where the afternoon slows down. Set the expectation before you spend a day on it: a contact tool finds verified details for well under half of a list, and in a narrow B2B category the hit rate falls close to zero. Expect twelve domains to give you four addresses and eight problems.
The addresses you find easily are usually the wrong ones. The most-emailed publishers respond to volume by making themselves harder to reach, so they shut the contact form and route everything through a list signup. A scraped inbox is frequently the one they already gave up on.
So the rule that turns a company list into a person list is that the ask decides the person. An inclusion request and an interview request go to different people at the same company, and sending either to the other is the same as sending it nowhere.
| The page | What to ask for | Who can say yes |
|---|---|---|
| A trade or niche publication | inclusion in the roundup they already published | the author first, then whoever owns the page now |
| A software review platform | nothing by email: claim the profile and earn reviews | your own team |
| An adjacent software company’s roundup | inclusion, which costs them nothing because you are not a competitor | their content or SEO owner |
| General technology media | a data point or a comment on a story they already cover | the writer on that beat, and rarely cold |
| An independent practitioner’s blog | a contribution, an interview, or the product to test | the person whose name is on it |
Start with the byline. When the byline turns out to be a freelancer or somebody who left two years ago, escalate to the current marketing contact rather than to the generic inbox, and say in the first line which article you are writing about.
In a Field This Small, a Bad Ask Costs You the Target
The spreadsheet hides what a short field does to the arithmetic. On four hundred rows, a deleted email is a wasted minute. On twelve domains, a deleted email is a domain you have spent.
That arithmetic is the whole argument, and the people receiving these asks have been describing it for years.
What publishers on the receiving end say
“Literally every single email follows the same template and as soon as I see the first sentence, I’m hitting the delete button.” — u/vlvblog, r/Blogging, Jul 2022
Read the date. She wrote that in the middle of 2022, before a language model had drafted a single one of those emails. In the same thread, publishers put the volume at five to twenty a day and describe the chasers that follow: the second and third message asking whether they read the first.
So sameness is not what changed, and anyone selling you the opposite is selling you a tool. What changed is that sending got free.
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So the recognition happens before the offer is read. Every guide on this subject tells you to offer something in return, and a fair offer inside a recognizable message is never reached at all.
What to Say, and What Gets It Deleted Unread
Three moves carry more weight here than anything else, and none of them appears in the template libraries.
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The vocabulary. Link exchange, guest post opportunity, collaboration, swap. Those are the words the recipient has learned to filter, and using one loses a trade that was otherwise fair. Describe what you want to happen to their page and let them decide what to call it.
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The negotiation. Tell a listicle owner you do not mind what position you land in. It deletes a whole round of back-and-forth, because the only decision left is yes or no.
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The sender. Send it yourself. The same message reads differently over your own name and domain than it does from a marketing partner’s. We have a commercial interest in saying the opposite, and it is still what we see.
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Beyond that, a first ask has five jobs, and they land in this order or they do not land.
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Name the page. The URL, and the specific thing on it you are writing about.
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Say why this person. One reason that would be false about anybody else on your list.
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Name the change. What you want to happen to their page, in one sentence.
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Say what they get. A reader, a contribution, a mention somewhere, an answer to something they asked in public.
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Say what you skip. Position, anchor text, a follow link. Every one you give up is a round of negotiation you never have.
Two cautions on everybody else’s advice. Personalization has a ceiling: what somebody published last month reads as attention, and what took digging reads as surveillance.
The follow-up has a cap too. After two or three unanswered messages they have seen it, and the rest of the sequence buys nothing except the reputation the publishers above are describing.
You will notice there is no template here. That is deliberate, and the reason is the argument: a template printed on a page with any readers becomes the next message everybody recognizes at its first sentence. The five jobs are the part that transfers. The sentence has to be yours.
What You Trade When Nobody Owes You Anything
A mention is a trade rather than a favor, which is easy to say and awkward when you have nothing obvious to trade. A young brand with no traffic runs into it immediately: a stronger site has no reason to swap with a weaker one.
The way out is to change the currency instead of improving the offer. Four things are worth more to a page owner than a link from a site they have never heard of.
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A placement you control. A slot in a list on your own site, or in a roundup you are writing anyway.
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A contribution. Something written for their audience, pitched as a specific idea rather than as an offer to write.
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A mention elsewhere. On whichever property you own that is stronger than your product site.
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An answer. To a question their readers keep asking and they have never had anyone qualified to answer.
Three inbound motions do this work and each is a different ask. You can write a guest contribution, request a placement in something already published, or pay for one. We publish none of their prices, and any number you are quoted is a judgment about one site rather than a rate.
The offer that scales worst and converts best is being useful to one publisher who owns a page that decides your category. There are about twelve of those people, which makes this a relationship budget rather than a mailing list.
How You Will Know It Worked, and What You Will Never Know
A placement is not a result until an engine reads it, and the gap between those two events is usually weeks and sometimes a quarter. So watch two things and ignore the dashboard.
Watch whether the page still carries you in a month, because roundups get rewritten and the edit that removes you arrives without an email.
Then watch the answers themselves. Ask an engine the five questions your buyers put to it, write down which names come back, and ask again in ninety days.
Qvery runs that at scale and we own it, so this is a recommendation for our own sister company. Mark it down accordingly, and make anyone quoting you a visibility number show you the captured answers behind it.
What you will never get is attribution. A buyer who reads your name in an engine’s answer, searches the brand, and arrives direct looks identical to one who always knew you.
So we set expectations on a conversion benchmark rather than on a promised number of mentions. A proposal that promises you a count is a proposal nobody can be held to, and the promise is the tell.
Where Your Afternoon Ends and a Quarter Begins
Everything above is an afternoon. The short list, the three checks, the person behind each page, one ask written for one of them. Run it and you will know within a week whether your category has a reachable field at all.
Two things will stop you, and both are worth knowing before you start rather than in week six.
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A category with gatekeepers. Where a page carries medical, legal, or financial advice, nobody will attach an unfamiliar name to their content whatever your email says. We spent a long run proving that and then stopped taking that kind of work rather than keep charging for it.
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The arithmetic. Twelve domains is one quarter of work. After that, growth comes from widening the field: more phrasings, adjacent categories, past the first page, other languages, the publications that have not written the roundup yet.
The widening is the part that never fits around somebody’s existing job, and it is the half of the Generative Engine Optimization workstream that partners hand over most often.
Empact Partners is a consultancy that builds go-to-market engines for B2B software companies. We have worked from inside our partners’ own marketing teams since 2020, which is why these engagements get counted in years rather than campaigns.
On the mentions side the method has a name, Existing Article Outreach, and the job is getting a partner named in the software roundups a buyer already finds and an engine already quotes.
An engagement opens with an audit and a roadmap instead of a content calendar. One senior consultant carries it and sits on your calls, two or three workstreams run at once because each one makes the next cheaper, and the horizon is quarters. Plenty of these partnerships run five years and longer.
Our position on the subject is narrower than the market’s. The list is not the asset and the tooling is not the constraint. The asset is a working relationship with a dozen people who own the pages that decide your category’s answer, and it gets built one careful sentence at a time, by someone with nothing else on their calendar that week.
If you want your brand named in the places AI engines read, and would rather not spend a quarter finding out which asks get deleted, book a call with me. We will find out quickly whether there is a fit here.
