Get quoted by the answer engines

What is AI search optimisation, in plain words?

Making sure that when someone asks an assistant a question you are the answer to, the assistant finds you, trusts you and quotes you. Assistants do not rank ten links; they compose one answer from a handful of sources and name them. To be one of those sources a page has to answer the question directly, in prose that can be quoted without editing, on a site that says the same thing about you everywhere. Most of it is the old discipline of writing clearly, applied with more rigour.

Why listicles stopped working

For a decade the page that ranked was the roundup: ten best, seven ways, the ultimate guide. Assistants changed what gets cited. When a model answers a question it looks for the page that answers that question, not the page that lists a dozen things near it. A roundup that mentions you in position six is not a source; the page that explains, in your own words, what you do and for whom, is.

So the work is almost the reverse of the old habit. Fewer pages, each on one question. The answer first, then the method, then the questions that follow. Headings that are the questions a person would ask. No fog in the first paragraph, because the first paragraph is what gets lifted.

How we make a brand quotable

1. 01

   List the questions

   The questions a buyer would ask an assistant before they would ask you: what does this cost, who is it for, how does it work, is it worth it. Each one becomes a page, or a section with its own heading.

2. 02

   Answer first

   Every page opens with the direct answer, in plain sentences, then earns the detail below. We write the answer so it is still true when quoted alone.

3. 03

   Publish the summary file

   A plain-text file at a fixed address on your site that tells an assistant who you are, what you sell, your prices and your proof, in the order it needs them. It is the shortest document we write and the one an assistant reads first.

4. 04

   Make the entity consistent

   Your name, address, founding year, what you do and who runs it, identical on your site, your Google listing, your social profiles and every directory. An assistant that finds two versions of you trusts neither.

5. 05

   Mark it up, then check

   Structured data for the organisation, the services, the prices and the questions, so the page is legible to a machine as well as a person. Then we ask the assistants the questions and read what they say.

How do you measure whether an assistant cites you?

We ask it. Every month we put the buyer's questions to the major assistants and record whether you appear, what they say about you and whether it is accurate. That is the visibility report inside Standard. We also watch for visitors arriving from assistant links in your analytics. There is no rank to report, and anyone selling you an AI ranking is selling a number they made up.

What we practise on this site

Every page here opens with the answer. The prices are published in words a machine can read. There is a summary file written for assistants, structured data on every page, one description of the company repeated identically wherever it appears, and a glossary of the terms a buyer searches before they search for an agency. For the Gettysburg Museum of History we wrote the event page the same way, so an assistant asked about the anniversary weekend has a page to quote rather than a reseller's listing.

We do not publish a figure for how often an assistant cites us, because we have not measured it to a standard we would defend. That restraint is part of the method. A brand that is cited for saying the number cannot be caught inventing one.