Short answer
Write each section so it stands alone: a direct answer in the first one or two sentences under a clear heading, then specific facts, numbers and named sources. Name your business, products and places consistently, show an author and a date, and keep your facts the same everywhere online. Research supports statistics and citations and penalizes keyword stuffing. Special markup and chunking tricks are not required.
What is the answer-first pattern?
Assistants lift passages, not whole pages, so each section should open with the thing a reader came for. Build every section the same way:
- A heading that is the question in the customer's own words.
- A first sentence that answers it and names the subject in full.
- A second sentence with the single most important fact, number or condition, and its source.
- Then the how or why, one example and one exception.
- A closing line with the next step.
How long should each section be?
SE Ranking's analysis found that sections of roughly 120 to 180 words between headings were cited most. That is a correlation, not a rule. The real principle is that each section makes sense on its own. Avoid starting with “it” or “as mentioned above”, define a term the first time it appears, and name the subject again instead of pointing back. Walls of text and one-line fragments both give an assistant less to quote.
Which facts and numbers help?
The 2024 Princeton and IIT Delhi paper that introduced generative engine optimization tested nine tactics. Adding statistics and cited sources raised visibility in generated answers by up to roughly a third, and keyword stuffing performed worst. SE Ranking found that pages with many concrete data points were cited more than data-light ones. Ahrefs, studying 1.9 million AI Overview citations, found that about 76% of cited pages ranked in Google's top ten, so ordinary SEO is still the foundation.
Treat vendor percentages with caution, because this research is young. A July 2026 critical survey says evidence standards are still unsettled. Replace vague claims with real, sourced ones:
| Vague | Specific (use your real facts) |
|---|---|
| Fast delivery | Delivery in [number] days to [areas], free above [amount] |
| Many happy customers | [Number] customers since [year], rated [score] on [named review site] |
| Experienced team | Run by [name], [qualification], working in this trade since [year] |
If you have no outside source, say so plainly. Label figures from your own work as yours, with the date and what you measured, such as “our own customer survey from [month and year]”. That is honest and still citable. Never invent a source to make a number look stronger.
What else makes a page easy to trust and quote?
- Clear entities. Use the full, same name for your business, products and places every time.
- Author and date. Show a byline, a short bio and both the published and updated dates.
- Fresh facts. Whether freshness raises AI citations is not settled, but an outdated fact is the easiest one to get quoted wrongly, so update prices and rules and say “as of late 2026”.
- Consistent facts across the web. Keep your name, address, phone number, hours and descriptions identical on your site, Google Business Profile and profiles elsewhere, so sources agree.
- Open doors. If you block an assistant's search crawler in robots.txt, it may be unable to cite you. See whether to block AI crawlers.
What does not matter, whatever you read?
- Special markup. Google's May 2026 guide to AI features says none is required. Ahrefs' May 2026 study of 1,885 pages found no meaningful lift in AI citations after JSON-LD was added, though those pages were already well cited. Markup still helps rich results. See schema markup.
- llms.txt. Google says it does not use it for Search, and Ahrefs found 97% of such files got zero requests in May 2026. See whether llms.txt works.
- Chunking, Markdown copies and other tricks. Google's guide says they are not needed. Write for people.