Marketing · Beginner
Answer engine optimisation: getting cited by AI search
Search increasingly means an assistant summarising sources. A practical guide to becoming one of the sources it cites.
The share of research that happens inside an assistant rather than a results page keeps growing. Being the source it draws from is a different discipline from ranking, though the two overlap.
This playbook is deliberately practical and takes about a day per priority question.
The playbook
01 Find the questions you should own
List the twenty questions a buyer asks before they would consider you. Phrase them the way a person types into an assistant, not the way a keyword tool formats them.
Ask the major assistants those questions today and record who currently gets cited. That is your competitive set.
02 Answer the question in the first paragraph
Assistants extract. A page that builds to its answer over eight paragraphs will lose to one that answers in the first, then elaborates.
Use the question as the heading, verbatim where it reads naturally.
03 Make the facts extractable
Specific numbers, dates, and named entities get cited. Vague superlatives do not.
Put comparable data in real tables and lists rather than prose or images, so it survives extraction intact.
04 Fix the technical layer
Server-render your content. Anything that requires JavaScript execution to appear may not be seen by every crawler.
Add appropriate structured data, keep your sitemap current, and make sure your robots rules do not block the crawlers you want.
05 Measure citation, not just ranking
Track how often you appear in assistant answers for your target questions. Re-run the checks monthly. The answers change.
Watch referral traffic from assistant surfaces separately in analytics; it behaves very differently from classic search traffic.
Start before the gap gets expensive.
Tell us where the work is stuck. We will tell you, in plain language, what AI can and cannot fix, and what it would take to do it properly.