• ai-seo (2.1.0 → 2.2.0): added citations vs. recommendations — the correction to citation-centric AEO strategy. New references/citations-vs-recommendations.md (grounded in Lily Ray's (Amsive) 100-query B2B study, Scrunch and SimilarWeb behavioral studies, and Growth Plays commentary): the AI visibility ladder (retrieved → cited → mentioned → recommended, each governed by different criteria, plus the shadow rung of being recommended against on requirements-heavy prompts), the self-promotional listicle risk (69% of the AI Overview citations earned by self-promotional "best [category]" listicles — 224 of 323 — appeared in answers that excluded the publisher from the recommendations; for emerging brands a self-ranked guide can act as a vote for competitors), stage-dependent buyer's-guide strategy (leaders get cited and recommended; emerging brands get citation and category framing — still worth publishing, with rebalanced expectations), what earns recommendations (offsite consensus: reviews, analysts, communities, earned media, video — with the test "if a model ignored everything on our domain, would the rest of the web still shortlist us?"), and what a recommendation is worth (Scrunch, observational: ~2× behavior lift vs. a passing mention; for users with no recent observed brand engagement, +182% branded searches / +117% site visits / +185% product views within a week; SimilarWeb: ~2.5× more new visitors — with only ~9% visible as AI traffic, the attribution blind spot) plus the measurement triad (prompt tracking with mention framing, self-reported attribution, call recordings). SKILL.md adds a compact citation-≠-recommendation pointer, a Recommendation-rate row in Monitoring, and caveats on the Listicle Block (content-patterns.md) and educational-content goals (content-types.md).
• competitors (2.0.0 → 2.0.1): added an AI-answer expectations-by-stage caveat to the alternatives-page format — these pages often earn AI citations, but recommendation depends on offsite consensus; for emerging brands a self-ranked list can surface competitors in the answer. Cross-references ai-seo's citations-vs-recommendations reference. Closes #427.