Get cited by AI (AI Overviews / AEO)

How to get cited by AI — AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot. The verdict on AEO, plus the 3-sentence answer format that actually wins citations.

There is no special AEO trick. Clint tried every published AI-citation tactic and got inconsistent results; what worked was running standard SEO well and letting citations come naturally. Structure your content properly and the citations come across ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews — you don't build a separate AEO program. llms.txt (Brian Winnham) is a low-priority test, likely more work than it's worth once citations already arrive.

So the question isn't "how do I do AEO" — it's "how do I structure a page so an answer engine quotes it." That's this page.

The one durable lever — the Q&A answer paragraph

Write a three-sentence paragraph directly under each question heading:

• Sentence 1: directly answer the question (no stories).
• Sentence 2: provide a source / how you know.
• Sentence 3: an example of the answer applied.

Why it works: AI is an answer engine — it goes to sources, correlates, and cites. This format hands it a clean, attributable answer, which triggers People Also Asked + AI-Overview citations. Credited to "Corey" (Clint calls him a con artist, but this one tactic is real).

This pairs with heading discipline — every heading is a real question tied to the primary keyword, so the page reads as a structured outline of answers. See On-page discipline for the heading half.

Supporting moves

These reinforce understanding (which aids citation indirectly — not because "AI loves JSON," which has zero empirical proof):

• Entities + machine IDs — naming the things Google recognizes in its knowledge graph, by their machine-readable /m/ IDs, tells the engine exactly what your page is about. See Entities (fast + right).
• Advanced schema — hand-built About + Mention schema citing those entities makes the relationships explicit for the parser. See Advanced schema.

Optional — reverse-engineer the citation pattern

If you want to go a level deeper on a specific query, you can reverse-engineer what the AI Overview rewards (Clint demoed this end to end on 2026-06-12):

1. Search a question to trigger a Google AI Overview.
2. Note the 3 sources it cited.
3. Paste those sources into Gemini and ask what information-gathering patterns were used to synthesize the answer.
4. Gemini returns a reusable content template — multi-tier sourcing (academic + commercial + clinical), de-jargonization, and a Problem-Action-Result structure.
5. Repeat across queries into one running .md file (tell it to add, don't replace), then prune to the high-value patterns.
6. Write to that template to raise your odds of being cited.

The same idea works across engines — Copilot/Bing, ChatGPT, Gemini — so do it across a few if the term matters.

What to actually do

1. Run standard SEO well — don't chase an AEO program.
2. Convert your headings to real questions and put the 3-sentence answer paragraph under each.
3. Capture entities and, on hard pages, add advanced schema.
4. For a priority query, reverse-engineer the AI Overview pattern with Gemini and write to it.