Search behavior has shifted. A growing share of questions that used to end in ten blue links now end in a single AI-generated answer — inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews. If your content isn't structured for that answer to cite you, you're invisible in a channel your customers are already using.
Here's the checklist we run through with every client before touching a word of copy.
1. Answer the question in the first two sentences
AI answer engines pull the most direct, self-contained explanation they can find. Long preambles before the actual answer get skipped over in favor of competitors who lead with it.
If a human would have to scroll to find your answer, an AI model will summarize around you instead of quoting you.
2. Structure content the way a model reads it
- Use real headings (H2/H3), not bolded paragraph text, to mark each sub-topic
- Keep one idea per paragraph — models excerpt paragraphs, not pages
- Use lists and tables wherever you're comparing options or steps
3. Make your site easy for AI crawlers to read
Beyond writing, there's a technical layer: robots.txt rules that don't accidentally block AI crawlers, a clean sitemap.xml, and — increasingly — an llms.txt or ai.txt file that describes what your site is and how it can be used. These don't guarantee citations, but they remove friction for the crawlers doing the reading.
What llms.txt actually helps with
Think of it as a short, plain-language map of your site for language models: what the business does, links to your most important pages, and any usage notes. It's not a ranking signal in the traditional SEO sense, but it makes your site easier to summarize accurately.
4. Track citations, not just rankings
Traditional rank tracking doesn't capture whether ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews mentioned you. We run a monthly citation check across a client's target questions to see who's actually getting quoted — and adjust content where a competitor is winning the answer.
5. Keep facts current and consistent
AI models weigh consistency across the web. Pricing, contact details, and service descriptions that match across your site, directories, and social profiles are more likely to be trusted and repeated correctly.
Where most teams get stuck
Not in the writing — in the technical setup. We regularly find robots.txt files blocking helpful crawlers by accident, sitemaps that haven't been updated in years, and zero visibility into whether AI engines even know a page exists. That's usually the first fix, before any new content gets written.
If you want a second pair of eyes on where your site stands today, that's exactly what our AI search visibility audit is built to do.