How to write content for AI search that assistants actually quote

When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Mode a question that needs current or local information, the assistant searches the web, reads a handful of pages and builds its answer from the passages that answer best, often with a link to each source. To write content for AI search, you write passages worth lifting: the answer first, plain definitions, figures with a date, and facts that only your business has.

Google’s guide to its generative AI features, published on 15 May 2026, says that optimising for them is still SEO, because they rest on the same ranking and quality systems as the rest of Search, and that you do not need to cut your pages into chunks or rewrite them for AI (Google Search Central). The habits below are clarity habits: they help a hurried reader first, and an assistant looking for a sentence to quote second.

This tutorial takes them one by one, with before-and-after rewrites you can adapt for your own pages. It is part of my complete guide to generative engine optimisation.

What AI assistants quote from a page

An AI answer that cites sources starts with a search, and often with several. Google calls this query fan-out: for one question, AI Overviews and AI Mode may run related searches on its sub-topics, then write the answer from what comes back. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude can search the web too, each with its own tools. My guide to getting cited in AI Overviews and AI Mode explains how Google picks its sources.

What gets lifted is rarely a whole page. It is a sentence or a short passage that answers one of those questions on its own: a definition, a figure, a step, a row of a table. A page whose answer sits under three paragraphs of introduction gives an assistant nothing clean to lift, and a hurried reader nothing to read.

Research points the same way. In the study that coined the term GEO, accepted at the KDD conference in 2024, researchers found that citing sources, adding quotations from relevant sources and adding statistics raised a page’s visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40% (Aggarwal et al.). It was a lab test run in 2023, so read the figure as a direction rather than a promise. Google’s guide reaches a similar conclusion in its own words: content that people find unique, compelling and useful is likely to do more for your presence in its AI features, in the long run, than any of its other suggestions.

How to write content for AI search: six habits at a glance

Each habit makes the page better for a person, which gives you a useful test: if a change only makes sense “for the AI”, leave it out.

Step 1: find the questions your customers really ask

You cannot answer first if you do not know the question. Three sources give you the real ones.

Your inbox and your phone. On first calls, prospects ask me the same three questions: do you have experience, what is SEO and how will it help me, and how long does it take to rank? Write down the questions your own customers ask, in their words rather than yours. Each one deserves a page or a section that answers it.

Search Console. Open Performance > Search results, click Add filter, choose Query, then Custom (regex), and paste the expression below. It keeps only the searches that start with a question word:

^(how|what|why|when|where|which|who|can|do|does|is|should)\s

Bing Webmaster Tools. The AI Performance report, in preview since February 2026, lists grounding queries: the searches Copilot ran before citing one of your pages. The data is sampled, but it shows how an AI rephrases your customers’ questions.

To go further, I use deep research tools to find what people in a niche complain about most and which words keep coming back. A complaint, phrased the way customers phrase it, often makes the best heading on the page.

Step 2: answer in the first two or three sentences

Under each heading, give the answer straight away, then the conditions, then the detail. Journalists call this the inverted pyramid. A reader who stops after two sentences still leaves with the answer, and an assistant finds a passage it can quote without stitching three paragraphs together.

Here is the third first-call question, before and after:

Before:
SEO is a long-term strategy, and results depend on many factors,
such as your sector, your competitors and the age of your website.
Every business is different, which is why we always recommend a
personalised approach.

After:
Expect four months to a year before SEO pays off: that is the range
in Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO. Some pages move faster.
For Pilotech, an air conditioning installer near Paris, the new site
brought its first lead three weeks after it went live.

Nothing in the first version is false, but it answers nothing, and every sentence would fit any agency’s website. The second gives a range, its source and a real case, and each sentence still makes sense if it is quoted on its own.

This blog follows the same rule. Every article opens with a Short answer box of two or three sentences: it is the first thing a reader sees, and the passage I most want an assistant to quote.

Step 3: define each term in one sentence

When a page uses a term your customers may not know, define it the first time it appears, in one sentence: what it is, then what it does or who it is for. Someone who asks an assistant “what is…” gets a definition back, so a page with a clean one-sentence definition already has something worth quoting.

Before:
Air-to-air heat pumps have become increasingly popular in recent
years, and for good reason. They offer comfort all year round and
more and more homeowners are choosing them.

After:
An air-to-air heat pump is air conditioning that also heats: the
same indoor units cool the room in summer and heat it in winter.

The second version is shorter and says more: “increasingly popular” and “for good reason” claim nothing a reader can check, while the definition gives a usable fact.

Step 4: swap vague claims for numbers, dates and names

Vague sentences are easy to write and useless to quote. Replace each one with something a reader could check: a number, a date, a place, the exact name of a menu. Two of these four rewrites come from my own offers:

Three habits keep this kind of writing trustworthy:

• Date your figures. A price, a limit or a statistic is true on a given date. Write “at the time of writing (October 2026)” or “in a study published in July 2025”, and update the page when the figure changes.
• Name and link the source. Your reader can check a figure that has a source, and citing sources was one of the changes that worked best in the GEO study.
• Copy menu names from the screen. Write the path exactly as the interface shows it, with “>” between levels, so that someone following your steps finds every word.

Step 5: shape headings, lists and tables around the question

Structure is where writing for AI search looks most like ordinary SEO:

• One question per heading, in the words you collected in step 1. “How long does an installation take?” beats “Timelines”, because it is what people type.
• Numbered steps for anything done in order.
• Tables for anything compared on the same criteria.
• Short paragraphs of two to four sentences, each about one thing.

Here is a comparison from my own work, first as a paragraph:

Before:
Squarespace and WordPress both have advantages and disadvantages,
and the right choice depends on many factors, including your
budget, your technical skills and your goals.

Then as a table:

The table also carries an opinion, which is the point. I usually steer solo owners towards Squarespace, because they can change a word without the layout falling apart, and keep WordPress for clients who can pay a specialist every month.

Structured data (schema markup) describes a page to search engines, but it does not replace clear text. In a test Ahrefs published in May 2026, adding it to 1,885 pages brought no meaningful rise in AI citations. My guide to schema markup for small businesses covers the types still worth adding.

Step 6: add what only you can say

An assistant that reads ten pages saying the same thing has no reason to pick yours. Google’s guide lists a unique point of view among the qualities that count, precisely because its AI systems review many sources. Only you can write about:

• your lead times, your guarantees and the areas you cover;
• your own cases, with the figures you are allowed to share;
• your mistakes, and what you changed afterwards;
• the questions customers ask you, with the answers you give them on the phone.

Here is a paragraph from my own field, cold emailing, before and after:

Before:
Cold emailing can be an effective way to generate leads, provided
it is done properly and follows best practices.

After:
In my campaigns, the first email is three lines at most, in plain
text, with no links and a phone number. Many prospects call
instead of replying: a call is quicker than writing back.

The second version could only come from someone who has run those campaigns, and that is what makes it worth quoting, for an assistant and for a prospect. Mistakes count too: of the sites I built for one client, the one that offered too many services never worked, while the one that ranks sells a few very specific services. My rule for cold emails, short and sharp, applies to web pages too.

Drafting with AI without losing what gets quoted

I draft with AI myself. I use Claude, partly because in my experience ChatGPT makes things up a bit too often, and I keep editing and asking for new versions until the copy is right.

Left alone, though, an AI draft produces the “before” versions above: the average of every similar page, with no dates, no names and nothing of yours. Give it your facts before you ask for text, and check every figure afterwards. Google’s guidance on AI-generated content holds AI-assisted pages to the same standards as any other, and warns that producing many pages with AI without adding value for users can count as scaled content abuse. Since 1 October 2026, it also says that all AI-generated content must be fact-checked and reviewed by hand before publishing. My method for making AI writing sound human covers the prompts and the edit.

How to check whether a rewritten page gets quoted

Give Google time to recrawl the page, which can take from a few days to a few weeks, then look in three places:

1. Search Console. The generative AI report for Search, next to the other Performance reports, shows how often each page appears in AI Overviews and AI Mode. It counts impressions only, already included in the main Web report, with no clicks or queries, so compare the same page over periods of the same length, before and after the rewrite.
2. Bing Webmaster Tools. The AI Performance report counts the citations of each page in Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries.
3. The assistants themselves. Once a month, ask the questions from step 1 in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, in a private window, with exactly the same wording, and note which sites are cited. My tutorial on how to check your AI visibility shows how to log the answers month by month.

Your checklist for the next page you rewrite

1. List the three to five questions the page should answer, in your customers’ words.
2. Turn each question into a heading.
3. Under each heading, answer in two or three sentences before any detail.
4. Define each technical term in one sentence the first time it appears.
5. Replace every vague claim with a number, a date, a place or a menu path, and link your sources.
6. Put steps in numbered lists and comparisons in tables.
7. Add one thing only your business can say: a case, a guarantee or a mistake.
8. Check every fact, then reread only the first sentence under each heading.

Then cover the basics, such as the title and the meta description, with my on-page SEO checklist; for blog articles, my guide on how to write SEO blog posts adds the rest. If you would rather hand it over, rewriting pages around real questions is part of my SEO service.