Short answer
There is no special schema or secret optimisation for AI answers. What determines whether you are cited is whether a system can crawl your content, identify your organisation confidently as an entity, and find a substantive answer worth quoting. Practically: allow the AI retrievers to crawl, publish genuinely authoritative answers to specific commercial questions, keep structured data consistent, and measure citations across surfaces rather than only positions in Google.
Start by rejecting the magic
A market has appeared selling AI search optimisation as though it were a distinct technical discipline with hidden levers. It mostly is not. Search engines have been consistent that the fundamentals still decide it — crawlability, content that exists as text rather than trapped in images, internal linking, consistent structured data, and genuine expertise. Anyone offering a proprietary AI schema is selling you something that does not exist.
What genuinely is different
- Entity clarity matters more. A system assembling an answer needs to resolve who you are with confidence. Inconsistent naming, thin About pages and absent structured data all create doubt.
- Depth beats coverage. Thin pages targeting keyword variants were always weak; now they are simply skipped in favour of one substantive source.
- Crawl access is a separate decision. The retrievers feeding AI answers are not always the same crawlers as traditional search, and blocking them by accident is common.
- The metric changes. Position in a results page is a poor proxy when a growing share of research resolves without a click. Citation and assistant referral traffic are the things to watch.
Own questions, not keywords
The unit that gets cited is a well-answered question. Not 'AI automation services' but 'how much does AI automation cost for a mid-sized business' — answered specifically enough that quoting it is useful. Write the answer in the opening lines rather than burying it under six hundred words of preamble, because the preamble is what gets skipped.
Being the page an answer is built from is a different objective from being the link above the answer.
What to stop doing
Volume publishing is now actively counterproductive. A large body of shallow content dilutes the entity signal that determines whether you are treated as a credible source. So does citing statistics you cannot substantiate — a claim that fails verification damages exactly the credibility this strategy depends on.
The path
- Buyer asks
- Retriever crawls
Must be permitted
- Entity resolved
Who are you, exactly
- Passage selected
Depth beats coverage
- Cited
- Retriever blocked in robots.txt1Common, and invisible until someone checks
- Entity ambiguous1Inconsistent naming, thin about page, no structured data
- No substantive passage1Thin keyword pages skipped for one good source
- Claim cannot be verified1A statistic that fails checking costs the credibility it bought
4 items awaiting a person, grouped by cause so one decision clears a class rather than a case.
Nobody can guarantee appearance in a given answer — the retrieval is not yours to control. What can be done is removing the reasons you are currently uncitable.
Last updated 2026-06-30 · Koderead
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