How to Get Your Website Cited by AI Assistants
The way people find information is undergoing the biggest shift since Google’s founding. AI Overviews now appear at the top of roughly 20% of Google searches, often replacing the traditional blue links entirely. Perplexity is attracting tens of millions of users per month who prefer its cited, conversational answers to traditional search. ChatGPT’s browse mode actively indexes the web. For businesses that have built their visibility strategy entirely around ranking #1 on Google, the ground is shifting beneath their feet — and a new optimization discipline has emerged to address it.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your content the source AI models want to cite. The principles overlap with traditional SEO but diverge in important ways. AI models are specifically trained to value content that is authoritative (supported by data, credentials, and citations), comprehensive (covers a topic fully, not just surface-level), structured (uses clear headings, lists, and Q&A formats), and trustworthy (includes E-E-A-T signals: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). A study from Princeton, Georgia Tech, and the Allen Institute found that adding statistics, citations to credible sources, and quotations from experts increased AI citation rates by up to 40%.
Schema markup is disproportionately valuable for AI visibility. FAQ schema, Article schema, and HowTo schema help AI systems understand the structure and intent of your content, making it more likely to be pulled into an AI-generated answer. Every page on your site that could answer a specific question should have FAQ schema with direct, concise answers to those questions. Your blog posts and guides should use Article schema with author credentials, publication dates, and update dates — all signals that help AI models assess freshness and authority.
The most important GEO strategy is creating what we call “answer-dense” content. When an AI model is asked a question, it looks for content that directly answers that question with clear, attributable statements. Hedged, vague, or overly promotional content is less likely to be cited than direct, factual content. Write the way an encyclopedia writes: state claims clearly, support them with data, cite your sources, and use a structure that makes the information easy to extract. Pair this with a robust internal linking strategy that connects related topics across your site, and you create the kind of interconnected authority that both Google and AI systems reward.