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Being citable by an assistant that is assembling an answer, rather than merely rankable by an engine that is returning links.

Also called Generative engine optimisation · AI answer visibility

01/What it means

An assistant is not choosing a page to send someone to; it is selecting a few sentences to reuse and a source to name. That rewards different properties: statements that stand alone without the surrounding page, facts that are checkable, an entity the model can resolve unambiguously, and structured data that says plainly what the organisation is and what it offers.

The practical form is unglamorous. Answer one question per page in the first paragraph. Attach a number to every claim that has one. Keep the entity consistent — the same legal name, the same identifiers, the same URL — across the site, the structured data and every profile that mentions it.

02/What people get wrong

There is no keyword-stuffing equivalent that works here. What gets cited is a page that answers a question exactly, states something verifiable, and belongs to an entity the model can identify. A site doing that already ranks well; the two are not in tension, and any tactic that trades one for the other is a bad trade.

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The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.