Web · Artificial intelligence
Getting Cited in AI Answers, Not Just Search Results
· 4 min read ·
For twenty years there was only one goal: rank as high as possible on a list of ten blue links. Today, for a good share of searches, that list isn't the first thing you see any more — above it sits a summary written by an AI model, answering the question and citing two or three sources.
And some people no longer go through a search engine at all: they ask an assistant directly. Either way, the question has changed. It's no longer "how do I rank higher", it's "how do I become the source that's cited".
The good news: the foundations haven't changed
There's been a lot of noise around this, with a new acronym every month. It's worth saying what hasn't changed, which is almost everything.
A website that doesn't load quickly, doesn't read well on a phone, blocks search engines from crawling it, or says nothing useful won't be cited by any system, AI or otherwise. Everything we've written about building a high-performing website still holds, and it's still where you start.
What's changed is what comes next, once the foundations are in place.
Answer the question, upfront
A model building an answer doesn't read your whole page looking for meaning. It looks for the passage that answers directly, and uses it.
In practice, this rewards a way of writing that was already good for other reasons: a subheading phrased exactly as people ask the question, followed immediately by the answer in two or three self-contained sentences. Context, caveats and edge cases come afterwards.
It's the opposite of the introduction that takes three paragraphs to get to the point. Nobody ever read that one; now nobody cites it either.
Being specific is what sets you apart
A language model already knows everything that's generic. If your page says what any other page in your sector says, there's no reason to cite it over the other thousand.
What it doesn't have is whatever exists only in your own house: the real turnaround times in your sector and your area, what usually goes wrong and how it gets fixed, what something like this actually costs in Portugal, the specific case you saw through from start to finish.
Your own numbers, named examples with dates, the conditions under which the advice doesn't apply — that's what makes a page the chosen source. And, as it happens, it's also what keeps a human reader to the end.
Say who's writing, and when
A signed page, with a visible date and updated whenever the facts change, is more likely to be used than anonymous, undated text.
It's worth having an "about" page that says who the company is, since when, where it's based and what it's done — not out of vanity, but because that's where the trust an automated system can measure actually comes from. And it's worth marking up the company details, articles and FAQs with structured data, which is a way of saying the same things in a language machines can read without ambiguity.
And the uncomfortable part
Being cited in an answer brings fewer visits than ranking first used to. The person reads the summary and doesn't click through. This is real, and there's no trick that fixes it.
What you can do is stop counting visits as if they were the goal and start counting enquiries. And accept that the citation has value on its own: appearing as a source in an answer is a recommendation, and anyone who does click through afterwards tends to arrive more decided than someone who clicked an ordinary result.
If you want to take this seriously, it's SEO and SEM together with copywriting — the two together, because apart they don't deliver.
Is your website cited, or ignored?
Tell us what your business does and what questions customers ask you. We'll see how well your site answers those questions today.