How to optimize content for AI search: writing pages AI will cite

The core principle

An AI assistant builds its answer from fragments of the pages it finds. Your job is to make sure your page contains a ready, verifiable fragment that answers the customer’s question and is worth quoting. In its documentation on AI features, Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode and that SEO best practices remain relevant. So everything below is good SEO and good GEO at the same time.

8 rules

1. Answer first. The first two or three sentences of a page or section answer the question directly: “Yes, we deliver across Estonia in 1–2 days, from €5.” Details come after. In our experience, AI lifts paragraphs like this into its answer almost word for word.
2. One section, one question. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode may run several searches across subtopics. Separate sections on price, timing, service area and warranty give you more chances to be cited for a narrow sub-question.
3. Figures, quotations and sources. In the GEO study (Princeton and co-authors, KDD 2024), adding quotations, statistics and cited sources worked best; the authors report visibility gains of up to 40%. Concrete prices, lead times, numbers of completed orders, links to standards and studies all make text quotable.
4. No keyword stuffing. In the same study keyword stuffing barely helped. Write the way customers ask, rather than repeating the query ten times.
5. Your own experience. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks whether a text shows first-hand expertise and offers original information rather than rewriting other sources. Photos of your work, real cases and your own data are things competitors do not have.
6. A clear author. Google strongly encourages accurate authorship information where readers expect it and treats made-up authors as a sign of low quality.
7. Key content as text. Google asks for important content to be available in textual form. AI may not read prices in an image, a menu in a scanned PDF or terms in a video.
8. The same facts everywhere. In our experience, if a page shows one price, the schema.org markup another and a directory a third, AI repeats the mistake or leaves the business out. Google also requires structured data to match the visible text.

Which content formats work best

This is our practice, not an official rule: neither Google nor OpenAI publishes a list of “preferred” formats. What they have in common is that information is easy to find and verify.

Can you write content with AI?

Yes, if the result is helpful. Google says quality matters, not how content is produced, but it calls using generative AI to produce large amounts of text without manual oversight low effort, and creating pages to manipulate rankings a spam policy violation. Use AI as an assistant, but the facts, figures and experience must be yours and checked.

A short checklist for every page

• is there a direct answer to the main question in the first lines?
• are there prices, lead times, addresses and other verifiable facts?
• are sources given for figures and claims?
• is it clear who wrote the text and why they can be trusted?
• is all important content written as text?
• do the facts match other pages, markup and directories?

To check the whole site rather than one page, see the AI visibility audit checklist.