Getting cited by ChatGPT: what AI search optimisation actually involves

A growing share of buying research now starts with a question typed into an assistant, and the answer arrives as a paragraph with two or three sources attached. That changes the goal. Ranking first is a position on a list; being cited is being the thing the answer is made of. The work overlaps with SEO but is not the same work.

Write in passages that can stand alone

A model quoting your page lifts a passage out of it. If understanding that passage requires the three paragraphs above it, it is a poor candidate. The pages that get cited answer a specific question completely within a short span: the question restated as a heading, the answer in the first sentence or two, and the qualification after rather than before.

This is close to the old featured snippet advice, with one difference that matters: an assistant is synthesising rather than excerpting, so hedging language and long preambles get dropped or, worse, summarised into something you did not mean.

Before a model can recommend you it has to be confident about what you are. Schema does most of that work: Organization markup that states the name, the location, the services and the links to the profiles that corroborate it. Where businesses lose here is inconsistency. A company described three different ways across its own site, its profiles and its listings is three weak signals rather than one strong one.

Off-site sources do a lot of the deciding

Assistants lean heavily on sources they treat as consensus: established directories, review platforms, community discussion, trade press. A brand mentioned across those is far more likely to surface than one whose only advocate is its own homepage. This is the part that cannot be done purely on your own website, and it is usually the part that gets skipped.

• Let the crawlers in. Check that the AI user agents are not blocked in robots.txt by an old default nobody revisited.
• Serve content in the HTML. Anything that only exists after a client-side fetch may never be seen.
• Date and attribute your pages. Freshness and a named author both feed how much a model trusts a source.
• Track it. Record the prompts you care about and re-run them, or you are guessing about whether any of this worked.

Ranking first puts you on the list. Being cited means the answer is partly made of you.

The reassuring part is that almost none of this conflicts with ordinary good SEO. Clear structure, honest specifics, a site that renders its own content and a brand that exists somewhere other than its own domain. The difference is mostly that AI search punishes vagueness harder, because a model cannot quote a sentence that does not commit to anything.