Writing to be cited: what makes a passage quotable by an AI assistant

What makes a passage quotable?

Five properties, and a passage needs all of them. An assistant that quotes a source lifts a span, a sentence or a paragraph, and attaches the page to it. Citability is the name for a span that survives being lifted.

• It answers the question completely in one place. The reader, or the machine, should not need the paragraph above or below. "Yes, we repair heat pumps; a diagnostic visit is a flat fee and most repairs are finished the same day" stands alone. "We do that too" does not.
• It names the thing. Who (the business), where (the town or the area served), how much (a range is fine), for whom, and when. A passage with no proper noun in it can be quoted, but it cannot be attributed to you as the answer about you.
• It is in the HTML. Our crawler executed no JavaScript, and nothing in the assistants' crawler documentation promises a rendering step. Text that arrives only after a script runs, or sits inside a PDF, is text a fetcher may never see.
• It carries a date and an author. A reader, human or machine, can weigh a statement it can date and attribute to a person; an undated, unsigned one it can only take or leave. Article markup names both in fields Google documents: datePublished, dateModified, and an author with a URL, which is what an author profile is for.
• It agrees with the rest of the site. If the passage says one price and the price list says another, or the phone number differs by page, the assistant has a contradiction, and a contradiction is a reason to quote someone else.

Why does this work? What the Princeton paper measured

The mechanism has been measured once, properly. Aggarwal et al., "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" (KDD 2024), took a benchmark of 10,000 queries, generated answers over a set of source pages, and changed the pages rather than the questions. Adding citations, quotations and statistics to a source raised its visibility inside the generated answers by up to about 40% for the best methods on that benchmark. Keyword stuffing, the old lever, did not help. The paper measured source visibility, not sales, and its sources were not small-business sites, so treat it as evidence for the mechanism rather than a forecast for your page.

The mechanism is plain once stated. A generative engine does better with sources it can quote and defend. A specific figure, an attributed statement and a verifiable reference are each easier to defend than a general claim. Your service page can carry all three: a stated figure (the price range, the response time), an attributable statement (your policy, in your words, under your name) and a reference a reader could check (the license number, the association, the manufacturer that certified you). Most pages state none of them.

The shape of an answer block

A heading phrased as the question, an answer of 40 to 80 words that stands alone, then the detail. The heading tells the machine what the passage answers. The first paragraph is the passage it lifts. Everything after it is for the reader who wants more, and it does not need to be short.

Three rules for that first paragraph. Lead with the answer, not with context: a yes, a no, a number or a name. Put the proper nouns in it: the business, the place, the service. End it; do not trail into the detail, because a passage that ends mid-thought is a passage that gets cut mid-thought.

Here is the shape for one question on a service page, with a generic trade and a placeholder where your name goes.

<h2>How much does drain cleaning cost in [Town]?</h2>

<p>[Business name] charges a flat call-out fee for drain cleaning in
[Town] and the surrounding area, which covers the visit and the first
hour of work. Most kitchen and bathroom drains are cleared within that
hour. A main sewer line with a camera inspection is quoted on site
before any work starts, and the quote is the price. Last updated
[Month Year].</p>

<h3>What the fee includes</h3>
<p>The detail: what is covered, what is extra, how scheduling works,
what the technician brings.</p>

<h3>When it costs more</h3>
<p>Roots, a collapsed pipe, an after-hours call: what changes the price,
and by roughly how much.</p>

The same block, five times, is a service page. Pick the five questions your phone gets: cost, timing, area, what is included, what happens if. Each gets a heading and a 40 to 80 word answer. Below the five, the page can say whatever else you want it to say. One block, on a page of its own, is an answer page.

What the crawl found on 9,483 sites

Most small-business pages are not short; they are unquotable. In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros, September 2026), the median homepage ran 880 words, and only 3.9% were under 150 words. Yet 61.5% of the sites had no question-and-answer content of any kind: no FAQ section, no FAQPage markup, nothing shaped like a thing a buyer asks. And 50.7% had at least one heading phrased as a question without answering it in a form a machine could isolate.

Two other findings bear on quotability. 64.7% showed no review signal a crawler could read, so the sentence that would make a recommendation defensible, the rating and the count, was not on the page. And 43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are across their own three main pages, which is the fifth property failing before the first is attempted.

The pages were written for a visitor who reads top to bottom and calls. An answer does not use them that way. What it can quote is a span that answers the question it was given, and a page with no such span has nothing to offer as a citation.

What each page type has to state to be quotable

Every page is the natural answer to one or two questions, and a passage that states the answer to those is what makes the page citable. The table is a checklist, one row per page type.

A note on the FAQ page. Google limited the FAQ rich result to government and health sites in August 2023 and stopped showing it on May 7, 2026, so FAQPage markup earns a business nothing on the results page. It still tells a machine which span answers which question, and it costs nothing if it matches the text. The visible question-and-answer pairs are what matter; the markup is a second copy.

How to check a passage before you publish it

1. Read the paragraph on its own, with nothing above or below it. Does it answer the question in the heading? If you need the previous paragraph to make sense of it, fold that paragraph in.
2. Count the proper nouns. Your business, the town, the service. If there are none, the passage is quotable but not about you.
3. View the page source with scripts off, or fetch the page with curl. If the paragraph is not in what comes back, it is not in what a fetcher receives.
4. Find the date and the author on the page and in the markup. If either is missing, add it. If they disagree, fix it.
5. Search your own site for the number or the fact you stated. Every other page that mentions it should say the same thing.
6. Ask one assistant the question with the page's address pasted in. If the reply paraphrases your first paragraph, it lifted cleanly. If it quotes a different part of the page, that part answered the question better than your answer block did.

None of this is writing for a machine, and Google's guidance on AI features asks for nothing beyond the SEO fundamentals and people-first content. It is writing the way a good front desk answers the phone: the answer first, in full, with the name of the practice and the price, and the detail if the caller wants it.