How to Make Your Website Easier for ChatGPT and Perplexity to Cite

I've spent the last year building an AI visibility tool, and in the process I've had to figure out what actually makes AI search engines cite one website over another. Most of what I assumed turned out to be wrong. Here's what I've learned. The basics: AI search is a different game If you're already ranking well on Google, you might assume AI engines will find you too. The data says otherwise. Ahrefs found that around 80% of URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI Mode don't rank in Google's top 100 for the original query. These engines aren't just repackaging Google results — they're making independent decisions about what to cite. What seems to matter most: Content structure and extractability — can the AI pull a clean answer from your page? Freshness — BrightEdge research shows pages updated within 60 days are 1.9x more likely to appear in AI answers Structured data — sites implementing schema markup and FAQ blocks saw a 44% increase in AI citations Depth over keyw