AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, and Perplexity do not rank pages — they synthesize answers and choose which sources to cite. That is a different game from traditional SEO, and it rewards different signals.
What earns a citation
- Clear, extractable answers near the top of the page, not buried under preamble.
- Structured data (FAQ, HowTo, Article schema) that makes your claims machine-readable.
- Original data, quotes, or numbers that cannot be found verbatim elsewhere.
Treat every page like it needs to survive being read by a machine first and a human second — clarity wins in both cases.