Become citable by answer engines
AI-referred traffic converts far above organic search because the assistant pre-qualified them, and movement here leads revenue by about a quarter.
Target: 3+ AI citations across ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity
Inside this
- Publish five pages answering real user questions5h
Pull the questions verbatim from your support inbox and Phase 1 interviews.
- Retrofit question-shaped headings on your top 10 pages2h
Headings that match how people ask are what extraction matches against.
- Publish a definition and stat block per core term2h
Self-contained, 40–60 words, one citable number. Written to be lifted whole.
- Earn genuine mentions on Reddit and Hacker News3h
Both are indexed heavily by assistants. Genuine is doing the work; astroturf gets caught.
- Write the twenty prompts you will re-ask forever1h
Prompts are keywords. Six shapes carry the decision: category, use case, comparison, alternative, “is X actually any good”, and the one with the buyer’s constraints in it — must do this, must connect to that, under this price. The last is where a shortlist is actually cut.
- Re-ask the whole portfolio monthly and score the answers2h
Three clean sessions per prompt, with the model version logged: one answer a month is variance, not movement. Then score position, recommendation, accuracy and the sources behind it.
- Read the prompts you lose as a to-do list45m
Whoever gets recommended instead has something you do not — a category page, a review count, a comparison, a thread. Name that asset, then go and build it. On a prompt with constraints in it, check the cheaper failure first: often the product qualifies and the fact that proves it is written down nowhere a model can reach.
- Mine Bing’s grounding queries for the prompts you are already cited on30m
The AI Performance report counts your citations in Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries, page by page, and lists the grounding queries — what the model actually searched when it used you. It is the only first-party record of an AI engine’s own queries; fold them into the portfolio.
- Read which pages AI Overviews and AI Mode pull in, in Search Console20m
The generative AI report counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country and device — no clicks and no queries, so read it for which pages Google’s answers draw on, not for traffic. Low everywhere can mean the site is opted out: check that setting before blaming the content.
- Cite a source beside every claim, and quote a named person, on the pages you want quoted2h
In the Princeton GEO study, citing sources and adding quotations raised a page’s visibility in generative answers as much as adding statistics did. A link at the end of the page does not count: the source goes in the sentence that makes the claim.