A growing proportion of the questions that used to go into a search box now go to an assistant. Who does managed IT in Suffolk. What should a website cost. Is Copilot worth it for a small business.

The answer comes back as prose, with a handful of sources cited. Being one of those sources is a different exercise from ranking first, and the gap between the two is widening — analysis during 2026 suggested the overlap between top search results and AI-cited sources has fallen substantially.

How assistants pick sources

Broadly, two steps. The assistant retrieves candidate pages, usually through a search index, then selects passages that answer the question well enough to quote.

That second step is where the difference lies. Ranking wins position. Citation wins on whether a passage can be lifted out and stand alone as a complete, specific answer.

Which produces a clear implication: write in answers, not in build-up.

What gets quoted

Five characteristics show up repeatedly in cited content.

The answer comes first

A section that opens with the answer and then explains it is quotable. One that spends three paragraphs establishing context before arriving at the point is not, because there is no passage that works on its own.

Specifics rather than generalities

Numbers, dates, prices, named products, concrete steps. Managed IT costs £35 to £75 per user per month in the UK in 2026 is citable. Costs vary depending on your requirements is not, and it is also useless to the reader.

Questions phrased as people ask them

Headings and sections that match real questions. An assistant matching a user's question to your content does so more confidently when your heading is the question.

Structure a machine can read

Proper heading hierarchy, lists where the content is a list and structured data. FAQ markup in particular is well suited to this, because each question and answer pair is already an isolated, complete unit.

Evidence of who is answering

A named author, a real business with an address, stated experience. Assistants weigh source credibility, and an anonymous page is weaker than one that says who wrote it and why they would know.

The old skill was writing a page that ranked. The new one is writing a paragraph that can be quoted without the rest of the page and still be true, specific and useful.

The technical side

Five things, none of them difficult.

1. Allow AI crawlers

Your robots.txt controls who may read your site. GPTBot, ChatGPT-User, Google-Extended, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and CCBot are the main ones. Blocking them removes any possibility of being cited.

Some publishers block deliberately, which is a reasonable position when your content is the product. For a business whose website exists to generate enquiries, blocking is self-defeating.

2. Submit to Bing, not only Google

ChatGPT's browsing has been built on Bing's index. A business visible in Google and absent from Bing is invisible to a meaningful share of AI answers. Bing Webmaster Tools is free and takes ten minutes.

3. Publish structured data

Organisation and LocalBusiness markup so your identity is unambiguous. FAQ markup on pages with question and answer content. Article markup on your writing. This is how a machine knows what your page is about rather than inferring it.

4. Consider llms.txt

A plain text file at your domain root giving AI systems a map of your most important pages. An emerging convention rather than a standard. It costs almost nothing, it does no harm, and it is worth publishing on that basis rather than on any promise of transformation.

5. Make sure your pages render without JavaScript

Many crawlers do not execute JavaScript. A site whose content only appears after scripts run may be, to those crawlers, an empty page. Check by viewing your page source and confirming your actual words are in it.

What to publish

The content that gets cited is content that answers questions your customers genuinely ask, in more detail than your competitors bother with.

Practically:

  • Write down the questions you are actually asked — in enquiries, on the phone, during quotes.
  • Answer each one properly, opening with the answer.
  • Include the specifics, particularly prices and ranges. This is where most businesses go vague and it is exactly where being specific wins the citation.
  • Add an FAQ section to substantial pages, marked up with structured data.
  • Say who you are. Named authors, a real address, actual experience.

How to check whether it is working

Ask the assistants. Put the questions your customers ask into ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI results, and see who gets cited.

Do that quarterly and record it. It is a cruder measure than search analytics and it is currently the only direct one available, and it tells you immediately whether the work is landing.

It is not a replacement for SEO

Worth being clear. Most assistants retrieve candidates through a search index, so ordinary search visibility is the entry ticket rather than an alternative. The local fundamentals in this article still apply.

What has changed is that vague, thin content now fails twice — it does not rank and it cannot be quoted. Specific, well-structured, genuinely useful writing wins in both places.

We build this into every site we produce, and our own site publishes structured data, an llms.txt and an open crawler policy for exactly these reasons. If you would like your site assessed for AI visibility as well as search, get in touch.