seo
Answer Engine Optimization: 6 Factors That Decide If AI Cites You
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
How to Get Perplexity and ChatGPT to Cite Your Website
How to optimize your website for ChatGPT and Perplexity: robots.txt, llms.txt, schema, and answer-first structure so AI search crawls and cites you.
I Audited 7 Websites for AI Citability. Here Is What Actually Predicts Citations.
Audit data from 7 websites shows domain authority does not predict AI citations. DA-10 sites outperform DA-92 sites. Here is what actually matters.
Deep dive
Why Domain Authority Is Irrelevant for AI Search (And What to Build Instead)
Domain authority has zero correlation with AI citation rates. Data from 7 audits shows what predicts whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude cite you.
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.
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
How to Get Perplexity and ChatGPT to Cite Your Website
How to optimize your website for ChatGPT and Perplexity: robots.txt, llms.txt, schema, and answer-first structure so AI search crawls and cites you.
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.