Hey, it's Cindy 🌱 You commented rank, so here is how to check whether AI answers already mention you, and how to order a page so it gets quoted.
btw the waitlist for AI System Club is now open! If you're keen on using AI to automate your content, video editing, job search, business or build AI agents, feel free to sign up (only if you want to hehe). Ps. the waitlist gets first dibs:)
🧠 Start with the honest bit. Only Google and Bing publish any guidance on what gets cited. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity document how to let their crawlers in and nothing else. Anyone selling you "the ChatGPT ranking factors" is guessing. Everything below is either an engine's own words or a measured study, and it says which.
step one
Check you are not blocked
This is the only step every engine agrees is decisive. Everything else is wasted if the door is shut.
🔍 Open your robots file. Type yoursite.com/robots.txt into a browser. You are looking for the word Disallow under any of these names: OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User (Claude), PerplexityBot, and Googlebot. If none of them appear at all, that is good news, it means nothing is blocking them.
🔘 Check the switch your website builder hides. This is what usually bites, because it is on by default on some platforms and it overrides everything. On Squarespace it is Settings, then Crawlers, then a box called "Block known artificial intelligence crawlers". It must stay unchecked.
☁️ If you use Cloudflare, check the bot settings. Cloudflare moved its default toward blocking AI crawlers in 2025, so a site that was fine last year may be blocked now without anyone touching it.
⏳ Then wait a day. OpenAI's own documentation says it can take about 24 hours from a robots.txt change for their systems to notice. Do not fix it and test it five minutes later.
step two
Find out if you already appear
Two free reports and one hour of typing will tell you more than any paid tracker.
✅ Turn the Google switch on. In Search Console, go to Settings, then Search generative AI. Google now requires a site to be included there to be eligible to show in its AI features. It is on by default, but check it, and changes take a day or two.
📊 Open the Generative AI performance report. Also in Search Console, under Performance. It shows how often your pages appeared inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, by page, country and device. Two honest limits: it is impressions only, so there are no clicks or queries, and the data starts on 18 May 2026 with no history before that.
🔎 Add Bing Webmaster Tools and open AI Performance. Free, and it is the most generous first-party data anywhere. It shows the grounding queries, the actual phrases the AI used when it went looking, and your citation share against every other site cited for that same query.
✍️ Run the ten-question baseline yourself. Write the ten questions a real customer asks before buying, then type each one unchanged into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google. Use a logged-out or temporary chat so your own history does not flatter you, and run each one twice, because answers change between identical questions.
💡 The column that matters is the third one. For each answer, write down: are you named, is a page of yours cited, and who got cited instead. That last list is your actual work list. It is usually a listicle, a subreddit, a YouTube video or a directory, and being inside those is often faster than out-ranking them.
the page order
What goes where on the page
This is the part nobody explains. Order the page like this and it also reads better for humans, which is the only thing Google actually commits to rewarding.
📍 Title: one question, one page. Two topics pretending to be one page will win neither. Before: Algorithm recovery and AI visibility services. After: AI visibility recovery for sites that lost their citations.
🔗 Web address: readable words. Before: /services/recovery-2. After: /services/ai-visibility-recovery. Ahrefs measured an 89.78% citation rate for pages with natural-language addresses against 81.11% without.
🧠 Big heading: say the title again, in human words. Not a tagline, not a second topic. If your title and your big heading disagree, the page is about neither.
✍️ Then the answer, in the first two sentences. Before anything else: before the hero copy, before the form, before your story. Sentence one answers the question with the answer actually in it. Sentence two says who it is for and who it is not for. Write sentence one so it stands alone if someone lifts it out, because that is exactly what happens: Claude quotes up to 150 characters of a page when it cites you.
❓ Headings: one per real question, in buying order. What it is, who it is for, how it works, what it costs, what it does not do. Use the questions you captured in step two, and if a question does not map to a section, you do not need that section.
🔢 Fill each section with evidence, not adjectives. This is the measured part. In a study of 21,143 citations, pages that shaped the answer carried numbers (+61.55% influence), definitions (+57.33%), comparisons (+55.28%) and real steps (+41.20%) against pages that did not.
🌱 Summary block only if the page is long. On a short page it just repeats your answer paragraph. Over about 1,500 words, put it straight under the heading and let it be the answer paragraph.
🧠 How long? In that same study the pages that influenced answers averaged about 1,940 words with roughly 10 headings, while the ones that got ignored averaged 170 words with almost none. But length was not the strongest signal, relevance to the question was. Write the full answer to one question rather than padding to a word count.
🪄 the page rewriter prompt
Here is a page from my website: [paste the URL, or the full text of the page].
My customer asks this question before they buy: [paste one real question from your baseline].
Rewrite this page so it answers that question first. Give me, in order:
1. A title of under 60 characters that IS the answer to that question, not a description of my business.
2. A web address in readable words.
3. A main heading that says the same thing in plain language.
4. An opening answer of two to three sentences. The first sentence must answer the question with the actual answer inside it, and must still make sense if someone quotes only that sentence. The second says who this is for and who it is not for.
5. The section headings, in the order a buyer decides, each one shaped as a question a real person would ask.
6. For each section: what evidence belongs there. Tell me where I need a number, a definition, a comparison against the alternative, or the actual steps. Mark anything you do not know with [I NEED FROM YOU] rather than inventing it.
Rules: use my own words and my real details. Do not invent statistics, prices, timeframes or claims about results. Do not write anything I would have to fact-check before publishing. If the page is trying to cover two different topics, say so and tell me which one to split out.
💡 If it comes back generic, paste this: You wrote this like a marketing page. Go back through and cut every sentence that would be true for any competitor. What is left is the page.
where things live
Where to change these on your platform
WordPress Title and address are on the post edit screen, the address under the title as Permalink. With Yoast or Rank Math the title sits in the SEO box below the content.
Squarespace Page settings, then the SEO tab for the title, and the General tab for the address. The big heading is the first text block on the page itself.
Shopify Scroll to the bottom of the page or product editor and open Edit website SEO. Title and address are both there.
Wix Pages menu, then the three dots beside the page, then SEO basics for the title and address.
💡 Two names for two different things. The title is what shows in the browser tab and in search results. The big heading is the large text on the page itself. They should say the same thing, and most people only ever edit one of them.
What you can safely ignore
🌱 Skip schema, llms.txt and FAQ markup. Google's own guidance says it plainly: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add." Google says it ignores llms.txt entirely, and FAQ rich results have been limited to government and health sites since 2023. Keep normal structured data if you already have it, because it still earns rich results in ordinary search. Do not pay anyone to add an AI file.
🧠 Set your expectations honestly. Pew tracked real browsing and found people clicked a search result in 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, against 15% where it did not, and clicked a link inside the summary in 1% of visits. Being cited is brand presence, not a traffic channel. Chase it because people ask AI about your category and you want to be the answer, not because it replaces search traffic.
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