CITED vs Ultimate Guide to Link Building: AI recommendations or link prospecting

Quick answer

These books do different jobs. Chris McCarron’s CITED (2026, updated July 2026) is written for business owners and focuses on getting a business recommended in AI answers. Garrett French and Eric Ward’s Ultimate Guide to Link Building (2nd edition, 2020) is a specialist book on finding link opportunities and building an outreach prospect list. If your question is how your business shows up in ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews, read CITED; if your bottleneck is finding sites that might link to you, read French and Ward.

What each book is about

CITED is Chris McCarron’s book about getting a business recommended in AI search. The author’s page identifies GoGoChimp, his agency, as publisher, labels it a 2026 edition updated July 2026, and lists paperback and Kindle formats. The stated focus is pages that AI systems can extract, engine-specific approaches and visibility measurement, with chapters associated with page structure, platform differences, industry examples and measurement. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews are named in the positioning. Author’s book page.

Ultimate Guide to Link Building is by Garrett French and Eric Ward. Entrepreneur Press lists the second edition for January 2020, with ISBN 9781599186481 for the paperback. Publisher catalogue, page 31. An authorized excerpt begins with terms that define a market and uses them to locate different kinds of opportunities, such as expert interviews, resource curators and sites accepting relevant contributions. It also discusses finding existing interviews and developing a new group interview from that research. Second-edition excerpt.

Where they differ

Subject. CITED is about AI answers: whether AI systems can extract your pages and recommend your business, and how to measure that across engines. French and Ward cover one traditional SEO discipline: working out which people and publications in a market might have a reason to reference your material.

Reader. CITED is aimed at owners asking a direct question about their own business. Ultimate Guide to Link Building is for readers who already understand basic SEO and need a focused process, such as people running outreach.

Evidence. French and Ward have a publisher catalogue entry and an authorized excerpt you can read free; the excerpt shows a prospecting process that does not depend on a specific tool. CITED is self-published by the author’s agency; its page promotes a scoring tool and agency results that we have not independently verified, and its place in the author company’s own best-book list is not an independent recommendation.

Era. CITED is a 2026 book. French and Ward’s edition dates from January 2020, so check any link or outreach tactic against Google’s current link spam policy, and match the second edition when buying.

A third option for a step-by-step beginner start

CITED already covers AI search for owners. A different reader, an owner or marketer who wants a step-by-step start with worksheets, might look at AI SEO for Dummies, a 2026 Wiley For Dummies title on visibility in AI-powered search, including AEO and GEO. Wiley names business owners, marketers and SEO professionals as its readers, and a free companion toolkit includes a quickstart checklist, a First 30 Days worksheet and trackers, with no email required. It is an alternative for that reader, not a replacement for CITED, and it is not a link-building book.

Disclosure: Top SEO Books is owned by Nathan Gotch, author of AI SEO for Dummies. How we handle this relationship.

Which should you read?

• If you own a business and want to know how it gets recommended in AI answers, read CITED, and look for a sample to judge how it connects evidence and actions.
• If you want a focus on extractable pages and engine-specific approaches, read CITED.
• If you know SEO basics but struggle to find sites that might link to you, read Ultimate Guide to Link Building, starting with the free excerpt.
• If you run outreach or digital PR and need a repeatable prospecting process, French and Ward is the closer subject match.
• If you want both, read them for separate problems: CITED for AI visibility, French and Ward for outreach groundwork.

For other options, see CITED alternatives, Ultimate Guide to Link Building alternatives, Generative Engine Optimization vs Ultimate Guide to Link Building or the AI-search reading guide.