How to write a page an AI answer engine will quote

Write one page per question, put the question in the title and the URL, and answer it in the first forty words. Every step below is justified by something we measured in 90 real Perplexity citations, not by folklore.

This is the writing task, not the strategy. If you have not yet worked out which questions to write about, start with choosing the questions to track and come back.

The nine steps

Pick exactly one question. Write down the question in the words a buyer would type, not as a keyword. One question, one page. If your draft answers three questions, it is three pages. The evidence: 69 of the 74 domains run A cited were cited for exactly one of our eight questions. Pages win narrowly.
Put the question in the title, the H1 and the URL. In run A of our Perplexity audit, 74 of 90 cited URLs carried a word from the question in the path on a strict literal rule, 75 of 90 in run B, and for one question all ten did in both. Make the address bar restate the question.
Answer it in the first forty words. The opening sentences are what gets quoted. Write the answer, not a preamble about why the topic matters. If a reader who stops after two sentences has the answer, an engine that stops there does too.
Put the specifics in plain text on your own domain. Prices, coverage, limits, what you do not do. A number inside an image, a PDF, a video or a chart cannot be quoted by anything. If it matters, it belongs in a sentence.
Say the thing your competitors will not. The exception, the limitation, the case where the reader should buy something else. Assistants reach for the source that resolves a tension, and a page that argues against its own sale is unusually quotable. Our most credible page is the one that lists five situations where we are the wrong choice.
Date every number and name its source. Say when it was checked and whether you verified it or are reporting somebody else’s figure. An undated price is worthless in six months and dishonest in twelve.
Add structured data that matches the visible page exactly. Mark up only what a reader can see, word for word. Markup asserting an FAQ the page does not display is worse than no markup at all — we shipped that defect ourselves and the story is on structured data for AI search.
Link it from two or three sibling pages. A page nothing links to is a page a crawler may never reach. Link from the pages a reader with the same problem would already be on, and from your index.
Re-ask the question a month later. Ask the engine the same question, record which sources it cites, and see whether you are one of them. If not, the page is not answering the question as directly as the pages that are.

The opening paragraph is the whole game

An answer engine fetches a handful of pages and writes from what it reads. It does not read your page the way a reader does; it looks for the passage that resolves the question. So the first forty words are doing almost all the work.

	Quotable opening	Unquotable opening
Shape	States the answer, then qualifies it	States why the topic is important
Example	“Citation share is the percentage of the sources an answer engine cites that point at your own domain.”	“In today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape, understanding citation share has never been more critical.”
Self-contained?	Yes — it survives being lifted out of the page	No — it means nothing on its own
Contains a checkable fact?	Yes	No

A useful test before you publish: delete everything but the first two sentences and read what is left. If it does not answer the title, nothing further down will save it.

Formatting that helps, and formatting that is superstition

Two things are worth saying here because the advice in circulation is confidently wrong in both directions.

Helps, because it is mechanically true: text rather than images, headings that are the sub-questions, short self-contained paragraphs, tables for comparisons, and explicit numbers with units and dates. All of these make a passage easier to lift intact.
Superstition until someone shows evidence: a specific word count, a keyword density, a “semantic entity” checklist, an llms.txt file. We publish an llms.txt and say plainly that we have no evidence it moved anything.

Where we cannot tell the difference, we say so rather than dressing a guess as a rule. That distinction is the only reason to trust a page like this one.

The honest limit of this advice

These steps are derived from 90 citations, on one engine, in one category, on one day. They describe the shape of pages that were cited. They do not prove that following them causes a citation, because we have not run a controlled test and nor, as far as we can find, has anyone else. We are running the experiment on ourselves in public and publishing the result monthly — see does AEO actually work? for what would count as proof and what we will do if the answer is no.

A page checklist you can run in five minutes

Does the title restate a question a buyer would type?
Is the answer in the first forty words of body text?
Does the URL path contain the question’s key word?
Is every number in text, with a date and a source?
Does the page say where the reader should go elsewhere?
Does the structured data assert only strings the page displays?
Do two or three other pages link to it?
Can a crawler fetch it without running JavaScript?

Common questions

How long should a page be to get cited by an AI answer engine?

Long enough to answer the question completely and no longer. We have no evidence that word count matters, and neither does anyone else who has published a method. What we did observe across 90 citations is that the winning pages were narrow: one question each, with the question in the URL. A short page that fully answers one question beats a long page that partly answers five.

Where should the answer go on the page?

In the first forty words of body text, before any preamble. The generation step writes from the passages it reads, so an opening that states the answer plainly is the passage most likely to be lifted. A useful test: delete everything but the first two sentences and check that what remains still answers the title.

Does adding an FAQ section help get cited?

A visible FAQ that answers real sub-questions is useful, because each answer is a short self-contained passage. FAQ structured data on a page with no visible FAQ is not useful and is actively harmful: it asserts content the page never shows. We shipped that defect on our own site and now enforce an exact-string check against it.

Should I write for people or for the engine?

For people, with the engine's constraints in mind. Every step on this page — one question per page, the answer first, specifics in text, dated numbers, saying where you are the wrong choice — makes the page better for a human reader as well. If a tactic would make the page worse to read, it is not on this list.

How to write a page an answer engine will quote