seo
Why ChatGPT Isn't Citing Your Site: 6 AEO Factors
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.
Get Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity: 5 Concrete Steps
If ChatGPT and Perplexity never crawl your site, they never cite it, and that traffic goes to a competitor instead. Optimize your website for ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI search in five steps: crawler access, llms.txt, schema markup, answer-first structure, and how to verify each one worked.
Deep dive
I Audited 7 Websites for AI Citability. Here Is What Actually Predicts Citations.
Ahrefs has DA 92 and gets cited by AI 5% of the time. If you don't know whether your site is ready to be cited, you're guessing. I audited 7 websites to find what actually predicts AI citations, so you can audit your own website content for AI citation readiness before spending another dollar on backlinks.
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%.
Applied / adjacent
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: My 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.