Getting cited by AI search is mostly old SEO plus one new habit

The part that has not changed

Retrieval-based answer engines pick from what they can crawl, parse and trust. Crawlability, clean markup, fast responses, unambiguous headings and structured data all still matter, for exactly the same reasons they mattered in 2015.

If your key pages are rendered client-side, load in five seconds, and describe your service in a paragraph that never uses the words a customer would use, no amount of AI-specific tactics will help.

The part that is new

Answer engines quote claims, not pages. The unit of citation is a sentence that answers a question directly and can be lifted without losing meaning.

So the new habit is this: for every question a customer actually asks, put the answer in one self-contained sentence, near the top, with the specifics in it. Not “pricing varies by scope”, but “a fixed-price site health audit is £1,800 and takes two weeks”.

How to check whether it is working

• Ask the four main assistants your top twenty commercial questions, monthly, and log who gets cited.
• Watch for referral traffic from chat interfaces separately — it converts differently and often better.
• Track brand mentions in answers even when there is no link. Being named without a link still moves demand.
• Treat every zero-citation question as a content gap with a name.

What not to do

Do not build a page for every possible phrasing of a question. Answer engines collapse them anyway, and you will end up maintaining two hundred pages that say the same thing slightly differently.

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Written by the OneRee team. If any of this is wrong for your situation, tell us — we would rather update the page than be right on the internet.