What do the search engines themselves say?
Google's guidance for its AI features is refreshingly plain. It says you don't need to write in a specific way for AI search, there's no need to break content into tiny pieces, and structured data isn't required. What it does recommend is pages organized into sections with clear headings, important content in text, and what it calls non-commodity content: something more useful than the same tips every other site repeats.
Microsoft's Bing team goes into more detail. It recommends descriptive headings, direct questions with clear answers, bulleted lists and numbered steps, comparison tables, and sentences that make sense when pulled out of context. It warns against long walls of text, answers hidden in tabs or expandable menus, core information that only lives in a PDF, and key facts shown only in images.
OpenAI's one hard requirement is access: sites that block its OAI-SearchBot crawler won't appear in ChatGPT search answers. None of the three asks for tricks. They all describe a page that's easy to read.
What does that look like on a real page?
Here's a section from a service page for a made-up plumber, before and after. The prices are invented for the example.
Before
Water Heater Services
At Desert Flow Plumbing, we pride ourselves on delivering top-quality service to every customer. With over 20 years of experience serving the greater Tucson area, our team of licensed professionals is committed to your satisfaction. Contact us today to learn more about our water heater solutions!
Nothing in that section answers a question. An AI engine asked "how much does a new water heater cost in Tucson?" has nothing to quote.
After
How much does water heater replacement cost in Tucson?
Most tank water heater replacements we do in Tucson cost $1,400 to $2,200 installed, including hauling away the old unit. Tankless heaters usually run $3,000 to $4,500, because they often need new gas lines or venting. We can usually install within a day of your call.
What moves the price:
- Tank size (40 or 50 gallons covers most homes)
- Gas or electric
- Whether the city requires a permit and inspection for your job
- Access, like an attic install versus a garage
The heading is the question a customer types. The first two sentences answer it with numbers, and each one still makes sense quoted alone. The list covers the follow-up question ("why would mine cost more?") in a format that's easy to lift. The "20 years of experience" line didn't need to disappear. It just belongs lower down, where it supports the answer instead of standing in for it.
The page checklist
- Answer near the top. Kevin Indig's Growth Memo analysis found 44.2 percent of AI citations came from the first 30 percent of a page's text. Don't make the answer wait behind an introduction.
- One question per section, in the customer's words. Use headings that match what people actually ask. Give each section room to answer properly: in SE Ranking's 2025 study of 216,524 pages, sections of 120 to 180 words were cited more than sections under 50 words (4.6 versus 2.7 ChatGPT citations on average).
- Sentences that stand alone. Name the thing instead of writing "it" or "this," and keep one claim per sentence. That's what lets an engine quote a line without the paragraph around it.
- Lists for steps, tables for comparisons. Microsoft recommends both. A price or feature comparison is much easier to lift from a table than from three paragraphs.
- Specifics over adjectives. Prices, times, counts, named sources, and quotes from people who know. In the GEO study presented at KDD 2024, adding statistics, quotations and source citations raised visibility by up to 40 percent on the researchers' test engine. SE Ranking saw the same pattern in the wild: pages with 19 or more data points averaged 5.4 citations, against 2.8 for pages with few.
- Key facts in text. Not only in an image, a PDF, a collapsed tab or a slider. If a customer would want to quote it, it should be selectable text on the page.
- A visible date, kept current. Ahrefs looked at about 17 million citations and found AI assistants cited pages that were 25.7 percent fresher on average than Google's organic results. Update pages when the facts change, and show when you did.
- Structured data that matches the page. It's optional, but if you use it, it has to describe what's actually visible. It helps engines understand the page. It doesn't earn a citation on its own.
These are the practical steps. The reasoning behind them, and how this fits with SEO, is in our guide to answer engine optimization.
What doesn't help?
Keyword stuffing. The GEO researchers found it did worse than leaving the page alone. Chopping every page into tiny question-and-answer fragments isn't needed either, and Google says so. An llms.txt file didn't help in SE Ranking's study, as our page on whether you need an llms.txt file covers. And FAQ schema is no shortcut: SE Ranking found pages with it were cited slightly less often.
A caution on all of these numbers: the SE Ranking, Ahrefs and Growth Memo figures show what cited pages have in common. They don't prove that one change causes a citation. You'll also see bigger claims online, like "tables get cited 2.5 times more." We couldn't trace those to a published study, so they aren't here.
Common questions
How long should the answer at the top of a page be?
There's no magic word count. Start with one to three sentences that answer the question outright, then give the detail. Don't chop the rest into tiny fragments either: Google says there's no need to, and in SE Ranking's 2025 study, sections of 120 to 180 words between headings were cited more often than sections under 50 words.
Do I need FAQ schema for AI to quote my page?
No. Google says structured data isn't required for its AI features, and in SE Ranking's study, pages with FAQ schema were actually cited slightly less often (3.6 versus 4.2 on average). That's a correlation, not proof schema hurts. If you add structured data, make sure it matches what's visible on the page, and don't count on it to earn a citation.
Should I rewrite every page on my site?
No. Start with the pages that answer the questions buyers ask before they choose a business like yours: services, pricing, how it works, comparisons. Those are the pages AI engines are most likely to pull from when someone asks about your category.
Can AI read content that loads with JavaScript?
Google says it can process JavaScript as long as it isn't blocked. Other AI crawlers are less predictable, so anything you want quoted, like prices, hours and your main answer, should be in the page's HTML as plain text. Our guide to AI crawler readiness shows how to check.
How Web Cited helps
The Free Snapshot runs ten structural checks on your homepage, such as your title, meta description, headings and structured data, alongside a buyer question to Claude. Citation Monitor goes further. Every week it asks your buyer questions across six AI engines, scans your key pages, and your first reading comes with a prioritized fix list, so you can see whether restructured pages start getting named.
Try the Free Snapshot Start Monitoring
By the Web Cited Editorial Research Team. Last updated 29 September 2026. Sources: Google Search Central (July 2026); Microsoft Bing (October 2025); OpenAI; Growth Memo (April 2026); SE Ranking (November 2025); Ahrefs (July 2025); Aggarwal et al., GEO (KDD 2024).