Introduction

The way people are searching for content on the internet has changed. Rather than typing a query into a search box, users are asking ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI. Whether your business turns up in those answers depends on what you publish. Our recent technical updates have provided the foundation for your site to be seen and promoted in the LLMs. This guide covers what to write, and how to get talked about in the places those answers are drawn from.


Testing the theory

Google’s own guidance for its AI features puts it bluntly: “Don’t just recycle what others on the internet have already said, or could easily be produced by a generative AI model.”

That gives you a test you can apply to any page you own. Could a model have written this without you? If the answer is yes, it likely won’t get cited, because the model can already produce it. A page that passes has something in it only you could publish.


How a page gets picked up

AI systems don’t pull in whole pages. They pull in passages. A section of your page gets lifted out and used without the rest of the page around it. Four things follow from that.

  • Put the answer first. Most business writing warms up before it says anything. Lead with the answer in one or two sentences, then explain.
  • Write headings the way people ask. “Our approach” says nothing. “How long does a cross-border acquisition usually take?” matches the shape of a real question, and the passage underneath becomes an obvious candidate.
  • Keep every section self-contained. Cut “as mentioned above” and “this is why it matters”. Those phrases hold a page together for a human reader. In a lifted passage they’re dead weight, because whoever reads it never saw what came before.
  • Quote someone, give a number and name your source. Researchers at Princeton and IIT Delhi built a 10,000 question benchmark and tested nine different edits to see which ones got a page quoted more often. The three that worked best were adding a quotation from a credible source, adding statistics, and citing sources. The authors report their methods can boost visibility by up to 40%. Adding a quotation scored highest. Keyword stuffing, the old SEO habit, did not help.

The gains were biggest for pages that weren’t already winning. For a site sitting fifth in the search results, citing sources increased its visibility by 115%.

Pages that do the most work

The definitive guide to your category. The best explanation of the subject you want to own. This shouldn’t be a blog post but rather the page someone sends a colleague when they’re explaining the topic.

Commercial decision pages. Comparisons, best-of lists, alternatives to a competitor. These are the most valuable questions you can win, because the person reading is choosing. One thing to keep in mind: a comparison where you win every row reads as marketing. Be honest about where someone else is better.

Original research. The strongest thing you can publish is something only you could have produced, whether that’s a survey of your own customers, benchmarks pulled from your own data, or an analysis of numbers nobody else holds. It’s the difference between summarising other people’s research and producing the research that other people end up summarising.

Product and service pages. These are usually worth a pass too, because most of them are thinner than they need to be. They should cover what the thing actually is, who it’s for, what it costs, what it works with, where it isn’t the right fit and who’s already using it. Concrete detail is what gets quoted by LLM’s

Say the same thing everywhere. Your name, services, address and contact details should match across every profile you control. If your site says you’re an agency in Kettering and your Google Business Profile says London, the contradiction can’t be resolved.

Worth a pass over:

  • Google Business Profile: name, address, phone, category, opening hours
  • LinkedIn company page: name, sector, size, people, activity
  • Companies House: legal name, registration number, registered address
  • Trade or regulatory bodies: accreditations, registration numbers, service scope
  • Industry directories: category, service area, contact details

A few strong pages beat hundreds of thin ones. Google’s spam policies call the alternative scaled content abuse, “when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users”.

A starting place

  1. Pick your ten most commercially important pages.
  2. Move the answer to the top of each one and rewrite the headings as real questions.
  3. Add one quotation, one number and one named source to each.
  4. Complete your LinkedIn, G2 and review profiles, and check your details match everywhere.
  5. Diarise a six month review for anything carrying a price or a statistic.

Sources

STUDIES AND OFFICIAL GUIDANCE


BACKGROUND READING