How the #1 Email Outreach Platform Dominates AI Search Visibility with CrowdReply.
10 mins read
Published Apr 2, 2025
The Challenge
Lemlist already had a dominant presence in traditional search. A Google search for "best email outreach tools" shows Lemlist appearing on virtually every organic result — blog roundups, comparison articles, Reddit discussions — covering nearly all available SERP real estate.
Fig 1: Google SERP for "best email outreach tools" — Lemlist appears in virtually every organic result, demonstrating their dominant traditional search presence across blog roundups, Reddit discussions, and comparison articles.
But search is evolving. AI-powered answers from ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and Gemini now sit above organic results, synthesizing answers from hundreds of web sources and presenting them directly to users.
Fig 2: Google's AI Overview for "best personalised email outreach tools" — AI-generated answers now appear above organic results, synthesizing recommendations from multiple web sources. Lemlist is highlighted for "AI-driven personalization," but the competitive landscape here is different from traditional organic rankings.
The Strategy
Step 1: Identify the Prompts That Matter
CrowdReply worked with Lemlist to identify the 10 highest-intent prompts that prospective customers are asking AI platforms — the exact queries that directly lead to tool evaluation and purchase decisions:
These prompts span the entire buyer journey — from broad category exploration ("best B2B email outreach tool") to direct competitor displacement ("alternatives to Instantly.ai", "Reply.io alternatives") to feature-specific queries ("hyper personalization", "cluster based email warmup").
Step 2: Monitor Across All AI Models for Probabilistic Data
CrowdReply continuously monitors these 10 prompts across 5 major AI platforms to build a probabilistic model of brand visibility. The citation distribution reveals which models cite what, and how often:
This multi-model monitoring is critical because each AI model has different citation behavior:
Google AI Mode and AI Overviews draw heavily from Google's organic index — which is where Lemlist's existing SERP dominance pays dividends. Having strong organic rankings has a direct, measurable impact on visibility in Google's AI features.
ChatGPT and Perplexity pull from a broader web corpus where Reddit threads, blog posts, and comparison sites carry outsized weight. These models are less directly tied to Google's organic rankings, requiring a different influence strategy.
Step 3: Extract the Citation Landscape
From the monitoring data, CrowdReply extracted a complete map of the citation landscape — every domain and URL that AI models pull from when answering these 10 prompts:
506 unique domains cited across all prompts and models
1,457 unique URLs referenced as sources
Fig 3: CrowdReply's Citations dashboard for Lemlist — 506 domains and 1,457 unique URLs are being cited by AI models across all tracked prompts. The bar chart shows the relative volume of top cited domains. This citation map becomes the actionable intelligence for the engagement strategy.
Top cited competitor domains in the vertical:
Reddit.com ranked among the top 10 most-cited domains — a significant and growing source, especially for Perplexity and Google AI Mode. Unlike competitor blogs or comparison pages, Reddit threads represent authentic community conversations where strategic participation is both natural and highly valued by AI models.
This citation map became the plan of action: it showed exactly which websites and discussions AI models are treating as authoritative sources, and where Lemlist needed to strengthen their presence.
Step 4: Strategic Reddit Engagement via CrowdReply
Reddit emerged as a key leverage point. Unlike blog articles or competitor comparison pages (which are difficult to influence), Reddit threads are community-driven conversations where authentic participation is both possible and valued by AI models as unbiased, real-user signal.
CrowdReply identified and facilitated engagement across 39 Reddit threads that were being actively cited by AI models. These threads spanned 8 of the 10 tracked prompts and were being pulled by all 5 monitored AI platforms:
The threads covered subreddits where Lemlist's target buyers actively congregate:
r/coldemail, r/Emailmarketing — core cold email communities
r/b2bmarketing, r/SaaS — B2B and SaaS buyer communities
r/sales, r/salesdevelopment, r/SalesOperations — sales professional hubs
r/CRM, r/CRMSoftware — CRM and tooling discussions
r/automation, r/ProductManagement — workflow and product communities
The engagement was targeted to threads that AI models were already citing, meaning each participation had a compounding effect: it improved Lemlist's visibility not just within the Reddit thread itself, but in every AI response that subsequently cites that thread.
The Results
AI Visibility Leaderboard: Rank #1
Fig 4: CrowdReply Dashboard — Lemlist ranks #1 on the AI visibility leaderboard with 66% visibility and a sentiment score of 98/100. The visibility trend chart shows rapid growth in AI presence. Lemlist leads Apollo.io by 1 percentage point (66% vs 65%) with the broadest model coverage across Google AI, Gemini, ChatGPT, and Perplexity.
Prompt-Level Dominance
Fig 5: Prompt-level visibility breakdown — Lemlist achieves 100% visibility on the competitor-displacement prompt "alternatives to Instantly.ai" and over 90% on B2B outreach and hyper-personalization prompts. Lemlist consistently appears in the top 2-5 positions across all tracked prompts.
Lemlist achieved 100% visibility on the direct competitor-displacement prompt ("alternatives to Instantly.ai") and over 90% visibility on core category prompts for B2B outreach and hyper-personalization features.
The Flywheel Effect
The combination of Lemlist's existing SERP dominance and CrowdReply's AI-focused citation strategy created a self-reinforcing flywheel:
1. Organic Dominance Feeds Google AI
Lemlist's strong organic rankings directly influence Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, which together account for 47% of all tracked citations (1,120 out of 2,387). Research shows that URLs ranking in position #1 are cited 43% of the time in AI Overviews, dropping to just 7% at position #20.
2. Reddit Engagement Feeds All Models
Strategic Reddit participation ensures Lemlist appears in the community-sourced citations that all AI models — especially Perplexity (21 Reddit threads cited) and ChatGPT (7 threads) — rely on for authentic product recommendations. These are real user discussions that AI models treat as high-trust, unbiased signal.
3. Multi-Model Coverage Compounds
By tracking and optimizing across 5 models simultaneously, Lemlist avoids blind spots in model-specific citation behavior. What Perplexity cites (heavy Reddit pull) differs substantially from what Google AI Mode cites (heavy organic index pull). A single-model strategy would leave significant visibility gaps.
4. Citation Coverage Creates Defensibility
With presence across 506 citation domains and engagement on 39 Reddit threads that AI models actively source from, Lemlist has built a broad citation footprint that competitors cannot easily replicate. Each new thread engaged and each new citation earned further compounds the AI visibility advantage.
Key Takeaway
Lemlist didn't just rank #1 in traditional search — they became the most visible email outreach platform across the entire AI search ecosystem. By monitoring 10 high-intent prompts across 5 AI models, mapping a citation landscape of 506 domains and 1,457 unique URLs, and strategically engaging on 39 Reddit threads that AI models actively cite, Lemlist built a defensible moat in the emerging AI answer economy.
