Anatomy of an AI-cited page
What ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini actually look at when they decide which sentence to quote.
Question in, answer out
Engines parse pages as question-answer pairs. The pages they cite most have a clear question framing (often the H1 or H2) followed immediately by a short, direct answer. If a reader has to scroll past 300 words of preamble to find the point, the engine will too — and skip you.
The signals they trust
Scannable headings, a TL;DR or summary block near the top, a visible 'last updated' date, named entities (your business, your city, your category), and links out to primary sources. Each one is a small trust nudge. Stack enough of them and you become the safe pick to quote.
Entity clarity
AI engines map words to entities (places, brands, products). The clearer you make those connections — your business name in the H1, city in the first paragraph, category nouns used consistently — the more likely the engine is to surface you when those entities show up in a question.
Hands-on