Guide · AI search
Getting cited
by AI search.
A growing share of "who does X near me" questions now get answered above the results, or in a chat window, with a handful of sources cited. Being one of those sources is a different job from ranking, and most of it is work you should be doing anyway.
Published 2026-09-08 · Formory Group
What gets cited.
Pages that answer one question plainly, near the top, in a sentence that can be lifted without surrounding context. A page that buries the answer under three paragraphs of preamble is hard to quote, and quotability is the mechanism.
Specific, checkable facts get cited far more than adjectives. "Median 54 reviews across 42 accounting practices in Toronto" is quotable. "We deliver outstanding results" is not.
Structure the machine can read.
Clear headings that state the question. Short paragraphs. Lists where the content is a list. Structured data for the business, the services and the FAQ — 9,386 of the 34,180 GTA sites we opened have none at all, which puts them at the back of the queue for no good reason.
Be the primary source.
Anything you can count, publish. Prices, timelines, what is included, how the process works, what you actually found in your own market. Original numbers are the most citable content there is, because nobody else has them.
That is the reasoning behind our own GTA survey: 49,994 listings opened and counted. It is useful to readers and it is quotable, which are the same property viewed from two directions.
What does not work.
Writing for machines. Keyword density. Stuffing an FAQ with questions nobody asks. Publishing thin pages at volume in the hope that one gets picked up — that is the pattern these systems are explicitly built to discount, and it is the same pattern Google penalises.
Do not block the crawlers by accident.
Several AI systems use their own crawlers and honour robots.txt. If you want to be cited, do not block them. Decide deliberately rather than inheriting a blanket rule from a template — and note that being cited drives real referral traffic, not just brand mentions.
Questions
Straight answers.
Does AI search replace SEO?
No. The same things make a page citable and rankable: clarity, specificity, structure and being trustworthy. The mechanism differs; the work overlaps almost entirely.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
It costs nothing to add and some systems read it, but Google Search does not. Treat it as optional housekeeping, not a strategy.
How do I tell if I am being cited?
Ask the assistants the questions your customers would ask and see who they name. It is crude, and it is currently the most reliable check available.
Check yours
The same test,
on your address.
We do not guess and we do not send a report by email. Type the address, wait ten seconds, read what comes back. If your site is fine it will say so.
If you want
one built.
We build the site, you look at it, and you pay once it is finished and you are happy with it. Hosting, edits and the Google listing carry on monthly, cancellable any month.