Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT’s browsing and search features, Perplexity, and Claude’s own web search all do a version of the same thing: they read real pages from across the web and generate an answer, sometimes with your business named as the source and sometimes without. Being the top blue link on a traditional search results page matters less when a growing share of people never see that page at all, they see a synthesised answer instead. Being cited inside that answer is now often worth more than the ranking position underneath it.
The good news is that most of what helps is an extension of solid technical SEO, not a separate discipline for every platform. Here’s what we’re doing on client sites and what we’d recommend to anyone else, regardless of which of these tools ends up sending the traffic.
Make sure the crawlers can actually reach you
This is the one that’s easy to get wrong by accident. Each of these platforms crawls the web with its own bot (GPTBot for OpenAI, ClaudeBot for Anthropic, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, Google-Extended alongside the standard Googlebot), and a surprising number of sites block one or more of them without realising it, sometimes from a security plugin’s default settings, sometimes from an overzealous “block all bots” rule copied from somewhere else. Check your robots.txt file directly rather than assuming: if you want to be eligible for citation at all, none of these should be disallowed. It’s a two-minute check that some sites are failing without ever knowing it.
Answer the question directly, near the top
These systems are built to extract and summarise content that answers a query clearly and concisely. A page that spends three paragraphs building up to the point before answering it is much harder to extract from than one that states the answer plainly, then explains the detail underneath. Lead with the answer, then support it, rather than the traditional essay structure of introduction, build-up, conclusion.
Structure content around real questions
The clearest way to think about this: write the heading as the actual question a customer would ask, and answer it directly underneath. “How much does a website cost?” as an H2 or H3, followed by a direct answer, is far more extractable than a paragraph that happens to contain the same information buried in the middle. This is exactly why FAQ sections with proper schema markup have become more valuable, not less, they’re already in the exact question-and-answer shape these systems are built to lift from.
Use structured data properly
Schema markup (FAQPage, HowTo, Article, LocalBusiness, and the rest) doesn’t guarantee a citation, but it gives every one of these systems an unambiguous, machine-readable version of your content instead of making them infer structure from HTML. Every FAQ block, every list of steps, every business detail that could be marked up with schema and currently isn’t, is a small missed opportunity across all four platforms at once. This only works if the markup accurately reflects what’s genuinely on the page, mismatched or padded-out schema is a real risk, not a shortcut.
Build genuine E-E-A-T signals
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust were already a ranking factor before any of this, and they matter even more now, since these systems are explicitly trying to identify credible sources, not just relevant ones. Concretely, that means real author bylines linked to a real bio with real credentials, Person and Organization schema that actually describes who’s behind the content, and content that demonstrates direct experience instead of reading like it was assembled from other people’s articles. A page that says “in our experience running X” and means it reads completely differently, to both a person and a language model, than one making the same claim generically.
Get cited and linked elsewhere too
All four of these platforms draw on multiple sources for a single answer, and being one of several sources cited for a topic is realistic in a way that owning the single top organic result often isn’t. Digital PR, genuine industry citations, and other sites linking to yours as a source all feed into whether a system judges your content trustworthy enough to cite, and this applies whether the system in question is Google’s, OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s or Perplexity’s. This is slower than on-page changes and it’s also harder to fake, which is exactly why it’s worth doing properly.
Keep the technical foundations solid
None of the above works if a page can’t be crawled and indexed cleanly in the first place. Clean URL structure, fast load times, correct canonicalisation, and a sitemap that’s being read without errors all remain the foundation everything else sits on. None of this has changed what these platforms need from a site technically, they’ve just made the cost of getting it wrong slightly higher, since a page that’s never indexed properly was never in the running to be cited regardless of how well-written it is.
Measure what’s happening, not what you assume
None of these platforms yet give a clean, dedicated breakdown of citations the way Search Console does for standard rankings, so this takes more manual checking than traditional SEO tracking: searching your own target queries across Google, ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity directly, and noting when and how you’re cited on each. It’s worth doing periodically instead of assuming a change worked simply because it made sense in theory, and it’s also the only real way to see how differently these platforms can behave from one another on the same query.
This is still a genuinely new and fast-moving area, and some of what’s true today will shift as these systems change, likely at different speeds from each other. The fundamentals underneath it, clear structure, real expertise, and clean technical execution, are the same ones that were worth getting right before any of this existed and will likely stay worth getting right afterwards.
