Our What is AI SEO post covers the concept. This one is the tactical follow-up: specific, practical things that improve your odds of being cited when someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini a question in your category.
Answer the actual question, in the first two sentences
AI tools tend to extract a short, clean answer to quote or paraphrase. If your page’s real answer is buried under a long preamble, an AI system either has to do extra work to find it (and might not) or extracts an earlier, less complete sentence instead. Put the direct answer to the question your H1 or H2 implies right at the start of that section.
Use the exact phrasing people actually ask
People ask AI tools questions in natural language — “how much does X cost”, “is X better than Y”, “what’s the difference between X and Y” — more than they type fragment-style search queries. Structuring headings and content around these natural-language questions, rather than just keyword phrases, matches how these tools actually parse and retrieve content.
Be specific, not generic
AI tools are trained to recognise genuinely useful, specific information versus generic filler that says the same thing every other page says. A specific number, a named example, a concrete framework gets quoted; vague statements that could apply to any business in any category tend not to.
Structure content so a section can stand alone
AI tools often extract a single section or paragraph, not the whole page. Write each major section so it makes sense on its own — restate enough context that the paragraph is coherent if someone reads only it, rather than assuming they’ve read everything above it.
Build genuine topical depth, not just one page
A single well-written page competing against a site with ten pages of genuine depth on the same topic is at a disadvantage. AI tools, like traditional search, favour sources that demonstrate breadth and depth across a topic, not just a single isolated article.
Keep technical SEO fundamentals in place
AI tools still largely rely on the same crawling and indexing infrastructure as traditional search. A page that’s blocked from crawling, slow to load, or buried deep in your site structure with no internal links pointing to it is unlikely to be surfaced by an AI tool any more than it would rank normally.
Track what you can, and accept the gaps
There’s no perfect way yet to measure every AI citation the way you can measure a Google click. Monitor brand mentions, watch for direct traffic spikes that don’t correlate with a known campaign, and treat this as an emerging measurement discipline rather than expecting complete visibility today.
See our AI SEO service for how we build this into an ongoing SEO engagement.
