What Is an Old Page Telling You When It Starts Getting Cited Again?

Everybody talks about AI citations like they’re weather. Somebody reads somebody else’s report, shows you a screenshot of a ranking, and that’s supposed to mean something.

A screenshot is a rumor. I wanted a count.

So we built what I call the bait board. It’s simple: every page on this site is bait. A “bite” is when an AI answer — Bing’s, in our case, because that’s where we pull the data — cites one of your pages. If you can’t count it, you can’t improve it. The board counts it.

The board, as of this week

Over the last six months, Tygart Media has pulled in roughly 1.6 million AI citations. Across the two six-month windows we’re comparing, 997 distinct pages have been cited. 870 of them are biting right now.

One page does most of the heavy lifting: our Claude AI pricing page, at 1,388,909 citations. That’s not a typo. That’s what happens when a page becomes the answer to a question a lot of people ask every day.

Every page on the board lands in one of four buckets:

• DEFEND — 945 pages. Biting now. Somebody out there thought it was good, and an AI keeps handing it out as the answer. You protect these. Iterate in place, never rename them, and check whether you’re still holding the seat — because a citation is a seat, and nobody holds your seat for you.
• RE-BITE — 52 pages. Proven bait that went quiet. They were cited, then they weren’t. Sometimes a competitor wrote the Costco-hat answer with the glasses and the supply chain added on, and took the seat. Sometimes the page just went stale. Either way: patch it in place and cast again.
• SOAK — 121 pages. Published, no bite yet. Let compounding do its work. Not everything needs touching.
• PRUNE — 61 pages. Never picked up. Stop feeding them.

The data comes down every night — three CSVs out of Bing Webmaster Tools: AI Performance, grounding queries, and pages, six-month window. I download them by hand on purpose. Don’t automate yourself out of this stuff. When you pull it yourself, you notice the weird one. You click through. You find something.

And the method matters more than the tool. It’s the tactic, not the tool — everybody’s tools are calculators. Whatever way you do this, do it the same way every time, because the delta is the information. Change your method every week and you’ll never know whether the number moved or you did. I used to look at this every 28 days. The world doesn’t run on 28 days anymore. Clarity defaults to three days, and honestly, three days is about right now. I check daily. I’m scared not to.

But here’s the thing I actually sat down to teach this week, and it’s the thing the board taught me — three patterns I can only see because the count runs every night.

Pattern one: the fastest source is not the cited source

Look at the dead bait. A big share of it is our timed storm watches — the automated storm updates that publish as weather moves through a part of the country, update, and expire.

They almost never get cited by Bing. Almost never.

I think I know why. When the moment passes and the engine settles on an answer, it doesn’t cite the quickest source. It cites the original, the best source. On a storm, we’re the quickest source there is — we’re built for speed, the update is live while it’s still raining. But quick is not the same as best, and after the fact, Bing goes back and picks the best. That’s not us, and on a timed watch it was never going to be us.

That doesn’t make the storm work useless — it feeds other sites of ours, and being first matters in other places. But if you’re measuring it by Bing citations, you’re grading a sprinter on a marathon course. Know which race each page is running.

Pattern two: a good article that dies at three weeks usually died in the title

The other thing I see on the board: solid articles — some of them op-ed pieces I’m proud of — that come up on three weeks old and fall off a cliff. Not bad articles. Articles that never made the first pass.

When I look at those, it’s the title. The title didn’t tell the engine, or the reader, what question this page answers. So it never got picked up in the first place, and by week three there’s nothing left to defend.

The fix isn’t rewriting the whole piece. The fix is two moves:

1. Retitle it so it answers the actual question in the words people ask it.
2. Give it something evergreen inside — a chart, a reference block, a section that stays true after the moment passes. An op-ed with an evergreen chart in it has something durable to be cited for. A storm piece with a standing reference section — what a project manager does when this kind of storm hits, say — has a reason to exist after the rain stops.

Timely gets you published. Evergreen gets you cited. A piece that only has the first one is on a three-week clock whether you know it or not.

Pattern three: old pages that bite again are sensors

This is the one that changed how I run the board.

Months ago, out of our Everett work, we wrote about a Boeing contract — the SPIA contract. Old news. Done. Except it isn’t: that page keeps showing up. It keeps getting cited.

My first instinct, months back, would have been to call that noise. It’s not noise. It’s a sensor going off.

If an old page starts biting again, it means the world came back to that topic and there wasn’t much else there. Thin coverage. We saw the same shape on one of our other properties — a sustainability piece about cosmetics CEOs that narrowed down, over time, to two or three companies actually doing the thing. The page didn’t change. The field did, and the page was the instrument that showed it.

Think about it the other way: say we wrote up an Everett AquaSox game a while back, and one of the kids in that game makes a World Series roster in a year or two. That old game page could light up again — and when it does, it tells you something is happening before the crowd writes about it. The re-bite is the first inkling. A disturbance, if you’ll forgive the reference.

So I’ve stopped treating old pages as prune candidates by default. Some of them aren’t content anymore. They’re instruments. You don’t throw away a gauge because it’s been quiet — the quiet is the baseline, and the spike is the signal. A re-bite on an old page is market intelligence, and it’s free: the page is already written, already out there, already costing you nothing to leave in the water.

Prune still exists — 61 pages earned it. But before a page goes in that bucket now, it gets one more question: is this dead, or is this a sensor that just hasn’t gone off lately? Those are very different things to delete.

The seat, and keeping it

Here’s the whole doctrine in one breath: get cited and you’ve taken a seat. Leave, and someone’s sitting in it when you come back. The engines don’t owe you the chair. So you count — nightly, same method, same window — and you sort every page into defend, re-bite, soak, or prune, and you listen to the old pages, because they’re telling you where the world is thin.

That’s the bait board. It isn’t fancy. It’s three downloads, four buckets, and the discipline to do it the same way tomorrow.

If you want to run this yourself

I teach this in layers, same as everything else we sell:

• The Bait Board one-pager (free PDF). The four buckets, the three nightly downloads, and the counting rules on one page. Print it, tape it over your desk, start counting.
• The Bait Board Field Guide ($7 PDF). The full method: how the six-month window works, how to read fresh bites against dropped pages, the churn math, and the sensor test — how to tell a dead page from a quiet instrument before you prune it.
• The Bait Board, Book-for-Bots edition ($17). The method written for the machines as much as for you — structured so an AI assistant can run the nightly sort with you: bucket definitions, decision rules, and the worked examples from this site’s own board, including the storm-watch and three-week-title findings above.

And if you’d rather have it done with you: the AI Citation Quick-Scan ($97) is where we run your pages through this same count and hand you the board; the $450 tier builds the board into a standing weekly practice on your site; and the $2,250 tier is the full desk — board, refresh queue, and the sensor watch running as a system. Same ladder we run here. The count comes first either way.

Start with the count. Everything else is commentary.

— Will