How to get your page cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity

More and more buying research now starts in an AI assistant instead of a search box, and the game there is different. An answer engine does not hand back ten blue links; it retrieves a handful of passages, synthesises them into prose, and sometimes credits the sources it used. To be one of those sources your page has to be easy for a machine to find, parse, trust and quote. That is a different job from ranking, and most pages are not set up for it.

What the engine actually does

When someone asks a question, the assistant pulls a few relevant passages from across the web, stitches them into one answer, and may cite the pages it leaned on. So you are not competing for a ranked position, you are competing to be a cleanly liftable passage on the exact thing being asked. Two things follow: write in self-contained chunks, and make the facts unambiguous to a machine.

The signals that get you quoted

• Descriptive headings: a subheading that names the question it answers splits your page into passages that can each stand alone as an answer, which is exactly what gets lifted.
• FAQ blocks: real questions with short, direct answers map almost one-to-one onto the way people prompt an assistant.
• Citable stats: a specific, attributable figure is the kind of thing an assistant likes to quote, because it is concrete and checkable.
• Structured data (JSON-LD): schema removes ambiguity about what your page describes, so the model is more confident you are relevant.
• Freshness: a visible update date and the current year tell a model the page is not stale, which it weighs when choosing what to cite.
• An llms.txt file: a young convention, but a cheap one, a curated map of your best pages for the crawlers that read it.

Entity clarity comes first

Before any of the formatting, the model has to be sure what and who your page is about. Name the product, company or topic plainly and consistently instead of leaning on pronouns and clever phrasing. Entity clarity, schema and citable stats are usually the three that move the needle most, so fix those before the rest.

Measure it, do not guess

None of this guarantees a spot. The engines change how they retrieve and cite often, results vary from one run to the next and by region, and the honest move is to treat the signals as a checklist of things that genuinely help, then track whether they work. Run a fixed set of buyer prompts each month and record, for each, whether you were mentioned, whether you were cited with a link, and roughly where in the answer. That grid is your AI-visibility trend line. The tool generates those prompts, scores your page on every signal above, and hands you the fixes in priority order.