An AI system putting together an answer isn't looking for a nice page but a usable passage: a piece of text that answers the question without needing the rest of the page. Writing for citability is therefore mainly about creating such passages. The rules below do exactly that.

01 / the answer firstThe question in the heading, the answer below it

The basic rule: put your reader's question literally in the heading, and give the full answer in the first paragraph below it, in forty to sixty words. Not the lead-up, not the context, the answer. The explanation, the nuance and the examples come afterwards.

That order feels backwards to many writers, because it gives away the suspense that a text normally builds up. But a searcher isn't the reader of a story: they want to know first whether they're in the right place. And an AI system that selects passages picks the block where question and answer sit together, not the page where the answer is hidden in paragraph eight.

The test is simple: read only your heading and your first paragraph, and judge whether that helps someone. If not, your piece starts too late. This article does the same itself; the answer to the title question came at the top, and everything after that is elaboration.

02 / the building blocksGive each type of content its own form

After the first paragraph, the form determines how readable the rest is. The rule of thumb: each type of content has a fixed form that lends itself to quoting.

The key test per block: is this piece understandable to someone who only sees this piece. If yes, it's citable. If no, it leans on context that an AI system won't supply. So avoid references like "as described above" within a block; each block carries its own context, or it won't be used.

03 / the substantiationFigures, sources and a name

Between two passages that say the same thing, the one that backs it up wins. State figures with the source and the year, refer to the original research rather than a summary of it, and put a named author under the piece. Also show when the text was last updated: currency counts, and a dated piece loses out to a maintained one.

Substantiation also means being honest about what you don't know. An estimate labelled as an estimate is citable; an estimate written up as fact is sooner or later exposed, and drags the rest of the page down with it. So write "we see this in our own projects" rather than a percentage with no source.

Structure is for the machine, text is for the human.

04 / the pitfallWriting for the machine backfires

The temptation is to overdo these rules: every sentence a search term, every paragraph an optimised little block. That demonstrably backfires. The Princeton GEO research (KDD 2024) measured that keyword stuffing made it perform 10 percent worse on Perplexity. Google also explicitly warns against chopping content into small pieces for AI and against separate texts for AI systems.

So the measure remains the reader. A text that a human won't finish reading doesn't get better for a machine. The structure in this piece organises what you have to say; it doesn't replace having something to say. How these writing rules fit into the broader approach is covered in how do you get mentioned in ChatGPT answers.

05 / the limitWhen writing rules won't save you

These rules only help if the rest is in place. If your site isn't technically readable for crawlers, even the best-structured text will never be found; check that first. Additional techniques such as structured data then make your data machine-readable, though an effect on AI citations hasn't been demonstrated, and that's covered in does schema markup help for AI visibility.

And if nobody is searching for what you write, the form won't change that. Write about the questions your clients actually ask you, in their words. If you don't have those questions clear, that's your first job, not the writing.

The rules at a glance, as a checklist for every piece you publish:

• The question literally in the heading, the full answer in the first paragraph of forty to sixty words.
• Each block independently readable, without references like "as described above".
• Comparisons in a table, processes in numbered steps, concepts in one standalone paragraph.
• Figures with source and year; estimates labelled as estimates.
• A named author and a visible update date.
• No keyword stuffing and no separate texts for AI systems.
• Checked in advance that crawlers can read the page.

This text was produced with AI assistance and checked and approved by a human before publication.