Original research
What actually gets your content cited by AI
We measure real citations from AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — against thousands of on-page signals, and report only what clears the bar. Some of it confirms the playbook. Some of it breaks it.
SEOLZ citation data · updated monthly · as of October 2026
What gets you cited
The signals that actually move AI citations, strongest first.
Content that leads with a direct answer is cited about 2.0x more often than content that buries it.
The single strongest on-page factor in our data. Front-load the answer in the first ~200 words, then support it. Source: SEOLZ AI-citation data, October 2026 (n=8,724).
Medium-length pages (roughly 500-1,000 words) win AI citations; going much longer doesn't help.
Depth for its own sake underperforms - a focused, complete answer beats a padded one. Source: SEOLZ AI-citation data, October 2026 (n=764,581).
How we measure this
Each finding is a correlation between an on-page signal and whether AI answer engines cite a page, computed over real citation checks and published only when it clears a confidence and sample-size bar. Figures are associations, not proof of cause, and they refresh every month — a finding that stops holding is retracted automatically.
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