The fundamentals survive - a crawlable site, real expertise, trust. What changes is the output: AI assistants don’t rank ten links, they compose one answer and cite a handful of sources. The game is being one of them.
What stays the same
Technical foundations, topical authority and credible mentions across the web. A site that can’t rank on Google rarely gets cited by AI either - the inputs overlap heavily.
What changes
Keywords become questions. Rankings become citations. Entity clarity - who you are, what you do, where, for whom - matters more than any single page, because models assemble answers from what the whole web says about you.
How to earn AI citations
Direct answer blocks on money pages, FAQs mirrored in schema, consistent entity information everywhere your brand appears, and original data worth quoting. See the GEO/AEO explainer and the AI search visibility checklist.
How to measure it
Ask the money questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini monthly and log whether you’re cited. Watch AI referral traffic in analytics. Treat citations the way you once treated rankings.
First moves
- Add a direct answer block to every money page.
- Mirror visible FAQs in FAQ schema.
- Fix entity consistency - same name, role and location everywhere.
- Publish one piece of original data worth citing.