AEO
How to get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews
Citation is not ranking. Assistants pick sources they can parse, verify and attribute — here is what that means page by page.
Technoyze Strategy Team8 min read
What actually makes a page citable
An assistant answering a buyer question does three things: it retrieves candidate sources, extracts a claim it can state confidently, and attributes that claim to something a user can click. A page that ranks but buries its answer under 600 words of preamble fails at step two.
That means citability is mostly mechanical. Can the answer be lifted as a self-contained sentence? Is the entity making the claim identifiable? Is there a date, an author, or a source that makes the claim checkable? Those are the levers, and none of them require guessing at a model's internals.
Structure the page around questions, not keywords
Use the buyer's phrasing as the heading, then answer it immediately in one or two sentences before adding nuance. This is not a formatting trick — it is the difference between an extractable answer and a paragraph a model has to summarise and therefore risks getting wrong.
Group related questions on one page when a buyer would ask them in the same breath, and split them onto separate pages when they belong to different decisions. Assistants tend to cite the page whose scope matches the question's scope.
Make the entity unambiguous
Organization or LocalBusiness schema, a consistent legal and trading name, matching profiles elsewhere, and one canonical about page do the work here. If two sources disagree about who you are or what you sell, the safe move for a model is to cite neither.
Service and Product schema matter for the same reason: they describe your offer in a format that does not need to be inferred from marketing prose.
Add the trust signals models look for
Published and updated dates, a named author with relevant expertise, outbound references to primary sources, and specific numbers instead of superlatives. Freshness is often the single cheapest missing signal on otherwise strong pages.
Avoid claims you cannot support. Assistants are increasingly conservative about unverifiable statistics, and a page full of them is a page they will pass over.
Measure it deterministically
You cannot control what a model says, but you can measure whether your pages carry the signals that make citation possible: schema presence, answer extractability, question coverage, freshness, crawlability. Our AEO audit scores exactly those and shows the evidence behind each one.
Treat live assistant answers as sampling, not as a KPI you can move directly. Fix the signals, then sample monthly on your priority questions.