There's no form to submit. Citations are earned by being the clearest, most verifiable source on the question — here's the checklist we work through.
Updated August 26, 2026 · 9 min read
Assistants answer questions, so build pages that answer questions. Write down the twenty things people ask you on the phone — cost ranges, timelines, whether you serve their town, whether you handle their specific situation — and make sure each has a clear home on your site.
One question per page or per clearly labelled section. A single page trying to cover eight topics gives an assistant nothing crisp to quote.
Put the answer first, then the nuance. Keep paragraphs short enough to stand alone and specific enough to be useful without the surrounding page.
Structured data is how you state facts unambiguously rather than hoping they're inferred correctly.
Assistants cross-check. If your hours differ between your site, your Google Business Profile and a directory listing, confidence drops and something safer gets cited instead. Audit your name, address, phone, hours, services and service areas across every profile you can find, then keep them aligned.
Reviews matter for the same reason they matter in local search: they're independent corroboration that you exist, operate, and do the thing you claim.
Most failures aren't subtle:
Ask the assistants directly, repeatedly, in the way your customers would phrase it, and note who gets named. Watch for referral traffic from AI tools in analytics, watch brand-name search volume, and watch the thing that actually pays: inbound enquiries mentioning they found you through an AI answer.
It's a coarser feedback loop than rank tracking. Directionally, though, the sites built to be quotable are the ones getting quoted.
Answer eight questions and we'll show you the structure, features and search strategy we'd recommend.
Questions
Not for the cited-source slots. Some assistants are experimenting with ads, but citations themselves aren't purchasable.
If your goal is visibility, no — blocking them removes you from consideration entirely. Publishers protecting paid content sometimes choose differently; a local business rarely benefits.
Better-structured content helps. Volume without specificity mostly creates competing pages that dilute each other.
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