seo
How ChatGPT and Perplexity Decide Which Sources to Cite
AI Visibility Engineering
System track
SEO optimizes for rank. Answer engines optimize for citation-worthiness.
This track is the engineering playbook for the second game: entity coherence, schema specificity, originality signals, and the measurement loops that show whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are actually citing you.
Guided track Machine-readable 16 foundational, tactical, and case-study notes
Why this cluster exists
SEO optimizes for rank. Answer engines optimize for citation-worthiness. This cluster is the engineering playbook for the second game, sized for operators, not enterprise SEO teams.
System object
retrieval lattice
Best for
content engineers and sub-DR-20 operators engineering for AI citations
Start here
The best first read in this track.
Core journey
Read these in order if you want the strongest mental model.
Foundation
Originality Signals and Citation Patterns
AI engines deprioritize pages that look like everything else. The originality signals that move a post from the summary layer into the quote layer, and why recap content is the new thin content.
Search Console's Generative AI Report: 3 Things It Hides
Google's Generative AI report went live for every property on August 11, 2026. No queries, no clicks, no API access. Here is my own 19.7K-impression report.
Deep dive
Get Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity: 5 Concrete Steps
Yes, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity can crawl your site: here are the exact crawler user-agents to allow in robots.txt and how to verify it worked.
How to Audit Your Website for AI Citation Readiness (7-Site Study)
How to audit website content for AI citation readiness: a 7-site study of what actually predicts citations. Ahrefs (DA 92) gets cited 5% of the time; a DA-under-10 site hit 15%. Run the same checks on your site, free, before spending another dollar on backlinks.
Applied / adjacent
Why Domain Authority Is Irrelevant for AI Search (And What to Build Instead)
You're building backlinks for a metric that doesn't matter to ChatGPT or Perplexity. Data from 7 site audits answers the real question, does site authority matter in AI citation rankings, and shows what to build instead: a DA-92 site got cited 5% of the time, a DA-under-10 site got cited 15%.
llms.txt for AI Crawlers: Why robots.txt Is Not Enough
robots.txt was built for search engines, not AI crawlers. llms.txt gives LLMs structured context about your site that robots.txt can never provide.
Dev.to Cross-Posting Without SEO Damage: Canonical URLs and the 72-Hour Rule
Automate Dev.to cross-posting without SEO penalties. Configure Zapier delays plus canonical URLs in 10 minutes to protect your search rankings.
Supporting angle
Not every important idea belongs in the main reading path.
Use the supporting pieces to deepen the model, test tradeoffs, and connect adjacent ideas without losing the main narrative.
Recommended next
Originality Signals and Citation Patterns
AI engines deprioritize pages that look like everything else. The originality signals that move a post from the summary layer into the quote layer, and why recap content is the new thin content.
Related tools and products
Audit your citability
Run the citability.dev scorer on any page to see what AI engines actually extract, cite, and miss.