For twenty years the goal of SEO was simple to describe: get your page onto the first page of Google. That goal has not gone away, but a new one has joined it. When AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews answer a question, they quote a handful of sources. Being one of those sources is increasingly where the attention goes.
We use the term AI citability to describe how likely your content is to be found, understood and quoted by these systems. It is not an official metric and no tool gives you a perfect score. It is a useful way of thinking about your website, though, and most of what improves it is within your control.
A simple definition
AI citability is the combination of three things:
- Accessibility: can AI crawlers and search systems actually reach and read your content?
- Clarity: once they read it, is there a clean, self contained passage that answers a real question?
- Credibility: is your business clearly identified and trustworthy enough that quoting you is a safe choice?
Miss any one of these and your odds drop sharply. A brilliant answer that is blocked by robots.txt will never be seen. A crawlable page full of fluffy marketing copy gives the system nothing to quote. A clear answer from an anonymous site with no contact details looks risky next to a well established competitor. If you want the background on how retrieval works, our article on how AI search engines choose sources explains it step by step.
Signal one: clear, direct answers
AI systems work at the passage level. They look for a paragraph or list that answers the question without needing the rest of the page for context. The easiest way to provide that is to put the answer first. If your page is about how long a bathroom renovation takes, the opening lines should say something like "Most bathroom renovations in Geelong take three to five weeks, depending on..." rather than a paragraph about your passion for quality.
Specifics matter. Price ranges, timeframes, service areas, eligibility and steps are all highly quotable. Vague claims are not. Where you are giving typical figures, say they are typical. That honesty also reads as more trustworthy to people.
Signal two: structure that machines can follow
Good structure helps humans skim and helps machines extract. In practice that means:
- One clear H1 that describes the page.
- H2 and H3 headings that describe what follows, ideally phrased the way people ask questions.
- Short paragraphs that each make one point.
- Lists for steps and options, tables for comparisons.
- An FAQ section for the follow up questions customers actually ask.
Clever headings like "The Magic Happens Here" might suit a brand voice, but they tell a machine nothing. "What our website packages include" is less exciting and far more useful.
Signal three: entity clarity
An entity is a thing a system can identify: your business, your people, your location, your services. AI tools are more comfortable citing sources when they can pin down exactly who is speaking. You help by being consistent and explicit:
- The same business name, address and phone number across your website, Google Business Profile and directories.
- A proper About page that says who you are, where you are based and what you specialise in.
- Author names and credentials on articles where expertise matters, such as health, finance or legal topics.
- Service pages that name the service plainly rather than burying it in jargon.
Signal four: structured data
Structured data, usually written as JSON-LD schema, is a machine readable layer that sits behind your page and labels what things are. Useful types for most service businesses include Organization or LocalBusiness, Service, Article, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList. It does not replace clear content, but it removes ambiguity. On WordPress, a good SEO plugin handles much of this, though it often needs configuring properly rather than left on defaults. Our guide to WordPress SEO basics is a good starting point.
Signal five: crawl access and technical health
This is the one most often overlooked, because it is invisible. Common problems we find include:
- robots.txt rules that block AI search crawlers, sometimes added by a plugin or a well meaning developer.
- Firewall or bot protection settings that challenge or block legitimate crawlers.
- Key content that only appears after JavaScript runs, which some crawlers handle poorly.
- Slow, unstable hosting that times out when crawlers visit.
- Missing or outdated XML sitemaps.
None of these show up when you look at your own site in a browser, which is why they persist.
A practical AI citability checklist
Run your five most important pages through this list. Be honest; a "sort of" counts as a no.
- Does the first paragraph answer the main question the page targets?
- Do headings describe their sections in plain language?
- Are there specific details: prices or ranges, timeframes, locations, steps?
- Is there an FAQ covering genuine customer questions?
- Is it obvious who the business is, where it operates and how to contact it?
- Are your business details identical across the site and external listings?
- Is relevant structured data present and valid?
- Does robots.txt allow the search and AI crawlers you want?
- Does the content load without relying on heavy JavaScript?
- Has the page been reviewed or updated in the last twelve months?
If you score seven or more, you are in decent shape. Below five, there is probably low hanging fruit worth tackling before you write anything new.
Getting a proper assessment
A checklist gets you started, but it will not tell you how AI tools currently describe your business or why a competitor is being cited instead of you. Our SEO and AI visibility audit covers technical access, content, structured data and real world AI answers, and you can view a sample report to see what you get. Questions first? Contact us any time.
