People ask what they should change to be cited in AI answers. Our answer is that there is no special method, and that the useful questions are the ordinary ones, pointed at new surfaces. We group them into five: entities, technical access, structured data, content and authority. This article takes each in turn and sets out what Google’s documentation says about it, as we read it. Where the documentation is silent we say so, because a claim that cannot be evidenced is not worth making. For the wider picture see our note on what Google says about AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Why five questions rather than a method
Google’s guide to AI features says the best practices for SEO remain relevant, and that there are no additional requirements to appear in those features. None of the five areas below is a trick; each is something a site either does well or does not. Treat them as a checklist of questions, not a promise of an outcome. Nobody outside Google can guarantee a citation, and the documentation itself warns that meeting every requirement does not guarantee a page is crawled, indexed or served.
Entities: is it clear who you are?
The entity question is whether a machine can tell who you are, what you do and how you relate to your topic. Google’s Organization structured data documentation is the most direct statement we found. It says adding organisation markup to your home page can help Google better understand your organisation’s administrative details and disambiguate it in search results, and that some properties can influence visual elements such as the logo shown in results. It also says no properties are required and recommends adding the ones that apply.
What the page does not say is that markup creates an entity, or that it produces a citation. It describes understanding and disambiguation. Consistency matters in practice because the same facts, such as the name, address and description, then agree wherever they appear. Our machine understanding guide covers entity and brand understanding.
Technical access: can crawlers reach and read the content?
Access comes first because nothing else matters if a page cannot be fetched. Google’s robots.txt introduction explains that the file tells crawlers which URLs they can access and is mainly used to manage crawl traffic. It also warns that it is not a mechanism for keeping a page out of Google; noindex or password protection are the documented alternatives. A blocked URL can still appear in results without a description.
JavaScript adds a second question. Google’s JavaScript SEO basics describe three phases (crawling, rendering and indexing) and say Google runs JavaScript with an evergreen Chromium. They also say server-side or pre-rendering is still a good idea because it makes a site faster for users and crawlers, and not all bots can run JavaScript. Links need to be anchor elements with an href, as Google’s link best practices state; our note on script-built links shows how this goes wrong. Controlling AI crawlers specifically is a separate decision, covered in our note on blocking AI crawlers.
Structured data: is the information machine-readable and accurate?
Google’s introduction to structured data says Google uses it to understand the content of a page and to gather information about the web, such as the people, books or companies in the markup. The general guidelines set the limits: do not mark up content that is not visible to readers, do not mark up misleading or irrelevant content, and do not use markup to misrepresent ownership or affiliation. They also say correct markup does not guarantee a feature will show.
The point for AI visibility is accuracy rather than volume. Markup that disagrees with the visible page is a liability. We look at what is and is not promised in our note on structured data. Google’s AI features guide adds that there is no special schema.org markup to add for them.
Content: is there something worth citing?
Google’s helpful content guidance is a list of self-assessment questions. It asks whether content provides original information, reporting, research or analysis, whether it describes the topic substantially and completely, and whether it offers insight beyond the obvious. It also lists warning signs of search engine-first content, such as producing lots of content on many topics in the hope some will perform, using extensive automation, or mainly summarising what others say without adding value. It says plainly that Google has no preferred word count.
We read “worth citing” as the same test: clear, specific and original, with the facts a reader or a machine needs stated plainly. Planning that from evidence is the subject of our note on planning content from evidence, and our citation opportunities guide covers citation-worthy information.
Authority: do credible sources reference you in the right context?
The same helpful content page introduces E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) and says trust is the most important of the four, and that content does not need to demonstrate all of them. Its questions include whether a reader would come away thinking the site is well trusted or widely recognised as an authority on its topic, and whether there is clear sourcing and background on the author or site.
On links, Google’s link guidance says it uses links as a signal when determining the relevancy of pages and to find new pages. The spam policies then draw the line: buying or selling links for ranking purposes, excessive link exchanges and automated link creation are all listed as link spam. Authority that counts is earned in a context the documentation would recognise, and we set out what the rules allow in our note on link building.
Common traps across all five
- Treating markup as a substitute for visible, consistent facts on the page.
- Blocking a page in robots.txt and expecting it to disappear from results.
- Publishing at scale for coverage rather than value, which Google’s guidance names as a warning sign.
- Buying references and calling it authority.
- Reporting AI visibility without saying what can and cannot be observed.
Where this fits at Cultured Digital: the five questions behind the AI search page
These five questions are the ones on our AI & Search Visibility page, under the heading that there is no “AI SEO” trick, only fundamentals pointed at new surfaces. They build on technical SEO, entities, content and authority, with extra attention to machine readability and measurement. The visibility review looks at how AI tools describe a brand, and measurement covers AI referral traffic and the limits of reporting. We cannot guarantee citations; we improve the conditions that make citation more likely and measure what changes.