How to Get Your Site Cited in AI Search

Search now answers before it links

Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Gemini write a short answer and cite a few sources. For many questions, being one of those sources is the new first position. The work of earning it is often called generative engine optimization (GEO).

The good news: most of it is ordinary SEO, done properly. The pages that get cited are the ones that are easy to find, easy to read and clearly trustworthy.

How AI tools choose sources

Most answer engines search an index first, read the best-matching pages, then write an answer from them. So your page has to pass three tests: the tool can reach it, it matches the question, and it answers clearly enough to quote.

Write pages that are easy to quote

• Answer first: put the direct answer in the opening sentence, then explain.
• One topic per page, with headings phrased the way people ask, such as 'How much does an MVP cost?'
• Specific facts instead of slogans: services, locations, timelines, price ranges and named clients.
• A short FAQ on service pages, with real questions from your sales calls.
• A visible author and date, and pages kept up to date.
• The same company facts everywhere: website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories.

Get the technical basics right

• Main content in the HTML, not only drawn by JavaScript after the page loads.
• Structured data: Organization, Article, FAQPage and, where it fits, LocalBusiness or Product.
• A robots.txt that doesn't block the crawlers you want, such as Googlebot, Bingbot and OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot.
• Fast pages, a current sitemap and clean, readable URLs. A web development partner can set these up.

Google's own guidance is that no special markup is needed for AI Overviews: the same rules as Search apply. A page that is indexed and eligible for a snippet can be shown.

Be mentioned beyond your own site

AI answers draw on reviews, directories, articles and forums, not just company websites. Real case studies, client reviews on independent platforms and articles that name you all help a tool decide you are a credible answer.

What not to do

Don't publish pages written for bots, hide text or mass-produce thin AI articles. They hurt trust with search engines and with people. Instead, check your analytics for visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com to see which pages already earn citations, and improve those first.