How AI search chooses which pages to cite

The short answer: AI assistants cite pages that answer a question directly, show who wrote them and when, and agree with other sources. You can't buy your way into an AI answer, but you can make your pages the easiest ones to quote.

How an AI answer gets built

When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google's AI features a question that needs fresh information, the assistant searches the web, reads a handful of pages, and writes an answer from them. The pages it leans on most usually get a citation or a link.

That means two things have to go right. Your page has to be found by the search step, and it has to be the clearest source once it's read.

What makes a page easy to cite

• A direct answer near the top. If the answer is in the first two sentences, the assistant doesn't have to dig.
• A specific, honest title. "Stripe checkout in two clicks instead of five" is more quotable than "Exciting improvements".
• A visible date. Assistants prefer current information, and a date shows it.
• A clear author or owner. A name, a company, a profile page. Anonymous pages are harder to trust.
• Facts that match elsewhere. If your pricing page says one thing and your docs say another, an assistant may quote neither.

What makes a page hard to cite

• answers hidden after long introductions
• headings that are clever instead of descriptive
• content that only appears after a click or a script runs
• the same thin page repeated with a different keyword

Let the right crawlers in

AI companies use separate crawlers for training and for search. If you block all of them in robots.txt, you may also block the ones that fetch pages for live answers. Decide on purpose, crawler by crawler. We'll cover the names and what each one does in a separate post.

Freshness is a real advantage for small teams

Big sites have authority. Small teams have something else: they ship every week. Each time you publish a dated, specific page about something you shipped, you give assistants a fresh source no one else has. That's the idea behind commiToday: every update is a public page with a title, a date and a clear explanation.

The takeaway

Write the page you'd want an assistant to quote: the answer first, the date visible, the author clear, the facts consistent. Then keep publishing.