A respected tabletop publisher was barely surfacing when players asked AI what to buy. Sixteen days after the WRKNG AEO System went live, Petersen was the #3 most-cited domain in the entire category, ahead of BoardGameGeek, and cited more than every competing publisher combined.
Petersen Games is the tabletop company founded by Sandy Petersen, who wrote Call of Cthulhu for Chaosium in 1981, designed every map in Doom's third episode and seventeen of the thirty-two levels in Doom II at id Software, and spent a decade on the Age of Empires franchise at Ensemble Studios. By the company's own accounting his games have sold more than 36 million copies and collected upwards of 70 industry awards across three separate categories: role-playing games, video games and board games.
The flagship is Cthulhu Wars, a premium asymmetric strategy game funded on Kickstarter in 2013 and delivered in 2015. Every faction plays differently, with its own units, its own spellbook and its own route to winning. That asymmetry is the signature move, and it traces straight back to Call of Cthulhu, where investigators and cosmic horrors operate by entirely separate rules. The Cthulhu Wars ecosystem now runs past a hundred items in faction packs, maps and expansions, alongside Hyperspace, Planet Apocalypse and the rest of the catalog.
The pedigree is not marketing. It is the reason the games work the way they do, and it is precisely the kind of story a model ought to be able to retell.
It could not. When a player asked AI which Lovecraftian or asymmetric strategy game to buy, forty years of credits counted for nothing. The answers came from Reddit threads, YouTube reviews and BoardGameGeek. Not from the company the designer built.
In the week before we started, Petersen accounted for 1% of every citation in their category, and every single cited page was a product listing. Not one piece of their own writing was being read or trusted by an AI engine. They had no way to see it happening, and no auction to bid into.
The WRKNG AEO System has two layers, because getting recommended by AI takes two things and most brands are missing both. AI has to be able to find your products, and it has to trust your brand enough to name it.
We rewrote the catalog for the way AI actually reads a product feed: titles, structured facts, player counts, mechanics, themes and the real phrases collectors search. The product pages were already being cited; this made them citable for the right questions.
When we switched the system on, it began publishing buying guides and comparisons written to be read, trusted and quoted by AI, on Petersen's own domain so the authority accrues to them. Within two weeks those posts were the most-cited pages on the site.
The week before the system against the sixteen days since. Measured live across five AI engines.
Flat for the week we measured before launch. Then the system went live, and AI coverage, citations and Google all broke upward in the same days.
Where measurement returned no entry for a brand on a given day, that day is plotted as zero coverage.
Before the system, every cited page was a product listing. Today the buying guides out-cite the products, and the products are still climbing. That's the two-layer effect in one table.
Every publisher we track in the category, by how often AI cites them as a source, over the same sixteen-day window.
All seven competitors combined: 220 citations. Petersen: 970, more than four times every rival publisher put together.
Across every AI answer in the category, only Reddit and YouTube are cited more often than Petersen's own site. They passed the hobby's canonical database.
The feed work made their products citable, but it was the buying guides that took the category. Five of the top six cited pages are posts that were published inside this window. Publishing is the lever.
BoardGameGeek has two decades of accumulated authority in this category. Petersen passed it in sixteen days of publishing. Incumbency in AI search is far weaker than incumbency in Google.
Cthulhu Wars O4 went from 17 citations to 60 in the same window without any additional feed work. Brand trust earned by content lifts the products alongside it.
This is not a slow-compounding SEO story. The system went live and the category rank moved inside three weeks. AI visibility responds far faster than organic search does.
We'll run the exact questions your buyers ask AI, show you who it recommends today, and where you rank against your competitors. Same engine that did this.
Get Your Free AI Commerce AuditCitation and competitor data measured live across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI (US). Baseline is the seven days immediately before the WRKNG AEO System went live; the result window is the sixteen days following. Daily rate normalizes for unequal window lengths. Prepared by WRKNG Digital · wrkngdigital.com
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