How to get cited by AI answers: a practical checklist

There is a growing pile of advice about "optimizing for AI" — special files, secret markup, magic tricks. The platforms' own documentation is far less mysterious. Here is what is actually documented to matter, as a checklist you can work through this week.

First, what you can skip

Google is unusually direct about this: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary"¹. Its documentation also rules out new machine-readable or AI text files, extra markup, and any special schema.org structured data as conditions for appearing¹. If someone is selling you a secret ingredient, the vendor documentation says there isn't one.

What remains is a short list of fundamentals — each one checkable.

1. Let the crawlers in

An answer can only cite what its crawler could fetch. OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot in your site's robots.txt file to help ensure your site appears in search results, and it is explicit about the opposite case: "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links"². Check robots.txt, then check the layers in front of it: CDN bot rules and firewalls can block AI crawlers even when robots.txt allows them.

2. Make sure the words are in the HTML

Fetching a page is not the same as reading it. Vercel's crawler study found that none of the major AI crawlers in its tests rendered JavaScript, and its recommendation is blunt: "ChatGPT and Claude don't execute JavaScript, so any important content should be server-rendered"³. View your page source: if your pricing and product facts only appear after scripts run, server-render those pages first.

3. Write for the buyer's question

Google's documentation says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features in Search¹. And the oldest best practice is answering the question that was actually asked. Buyers comparing options ask assistants category questions ("how do I choose…", "what should a small team use…"), not brand questions. A page that answers the category question, plainly and near the top, gives a retrieval system something to cite. A page organized around your own product vocabulary does not.

4. Be present on the pages answers already cite

Look beyond your own site: the pages an answer cites can just as well be comparisons, directories, documentation or community threads. Ask the assistants your market uses, open the citations, and note where competitors are named and you are not. Those third-party pages are a to-do list — get listed, get reviewed, get documented there. We call this the citation gap, and closing it can be faster than winning a new ranking.

5. Measure, then repeat

AI answers change as their sources change, so a one-off check decays quickly. OLAB Assist records the AI answers to your questions, reads the cited pages, flags where you are missing, and turns each finding into a task — with context, evidence, steps and code — that you or your AI agent can act on. The next scans then show whether the citation landed.

Start with your own questions

Start on the free plan, one site for 7 days with no card needed, or try any paid plan free for 7 days. Add the questions your buyers ask; the checklist above becomes a dashboard instead of a chore.