AI Visibility ·
How to Structure a Page So AI Assistants Will Quote It
By Hasnain Hararwala
Head of Digital
Short answer
AI assistants lift passages that are short, self-contained and unambiguous. In practice that means putting a direct 40 to 70 word answer immediately below each heading, phrasing headings as the questions people actually ask, using tables for anything comparative, defining terms explicitly, and attributing specific numbers. Persuasive prose that builds to a conclusion is the hardest kind of writing for a model to quote, because no single passage stands alone.
Answer first, context second
The inverted pyramid, rediscovered. Put the answer in the first sentence under the heading, then explain. A model scanning your page for a quotable passage needs one that makes sense without the surrounding paragraphs, and an answer-first block is exactly that.
Write headings as questions
"How long does SEO take?" is matched against a user's question far more readily than "Timelines". You are trying to make the mapping between a real question and your answer as short as possible.
Keep quotable units short
Aim for 40 to 70 words per self-contained claim. Longer than that and a model will paraphrase, which loses the specificity that made the passage worth citing. Shorter and it lacks enough context to stand alone.
Use tables for anything comparative
Comparisons, price tiers, feature differences, before-and-after figures. Tables are unusually well-represented in AI answers because the relationships between values are explicit rather than implied by prose.
Define your terms in place
Don't assume the reader arrived from your homepage — assume they arrived mid-page with no context. Defining a term on first use makes the passage self-contained, which is the whole game.
Attribute specific numbers
"Most Australian SEO retainers fall between $800 and $5,000 a month" is citable. "SEO can be expensive" is not. Specificity is what makes a source worth naming, and naming the source is what gets you the mention.
Don't hide it behind JavaScript
If the content only appears after a script runs, some crawlers will never see it. Accordions built on native HTML disclosure elements are readable; ones that fetch content on click often aren't. This is a standing check in our AI visibility work — see also schema markup that matters.
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