Why rewriting your content alone won't get you cited by AI answers

Where did the idea of rewriting for AI come from?

In late 2023 a research team published what became known as the GEO paper, later presented at KDD 2024. They built a test set of questions, rewrote source pages in different ways, and measured how visible each source was in answers written by a generative search system. Some rewrites, such as adding quotations, citing sources and including statistics, did better than others in their set-up.

That was a useful piece of work, and it gave the field a name. But it was a controlled experiment, on a research system, at one point in time. Somewhere along the way it turned into a sales line: “add stats and quotes and ChatGPT will cite you.” That is not what the paper claimed, and it is not what we see when we look at live answers.

What have later checks found?

When researchers have since tried similar rewrites against the AI engines people actually use, the lift has largely failed to show up in a dependable way. Sometimes a rewritten page is cited a bit more, sometimes a bit less, and the swings are often no bigger than the ordinary variation between two runs of the same question.

That does not mean writing is irrelevant. It means wording is rarely the thing standing between you and a citation. In our scans, the pages that never get cited usually have a more basic problem further upstream.

So what actually sits between a question and a citation?

Think of it as a chain. Every link has to hold, and the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Polishing the last link does nothing if the first one is broken.

1. Reachable: AI crawlers and agents can fetch the page, and the text is in the HTML rather than hidden behind scripts or a bot wall.
2. Retrieved: when the engine searches for the question, your page is among the candidates it pulls back.
3. Chosen: among those candidates, yours is picked as a source and placed where the answer actually uses it.
4. Quoted faithfully: the answer says what your page says, not a garbled version of it.
5. Backed by others: reviews, directories, press and comparison pages say the same thing about you.

Wording mostly helps at step four, and a little at step three. It does nothing for a page an engine cannot read, and very little for a business no other site mentions.

Is good writing a waste of time, then?

No. Clear writing still matters, just for different reasons than the rewrite crowd suggests. A passage that answers one question in plain words, with names, numbers and dates, is easier to lift and harder to misquote. That protects you once you are cited. It also helps the human who clicks through, which is the whole point.

What we would not do is spend a month sprinkling statistics into every page and expect the citations to follow. Statistics that are real and sourced belong on the page because they help the reader. Statistics added as a trick tend to read like one.

Why do we keep saying “associated with” rather than “causes”?

Because almost everything known about AI citation comes from watching which pages get cited and noting what they have in common. Pages that are cited often tend to be on sites that are mentioned widely elsewhere, load fast and answer questions directly. But those sites also tend to be older, bigger and better known. Pulling the threads apart is hard, and the engines change underneath you while you try.

So when someone shows you a before-and-after chart for a single page, ask two questions. Did anything else change at the same time? And how much does that number move when nothing changes at all?

What should a small business do instead?

Take a dental clinic as an example. It rewrites its implant page three times and still never appears when someone asks an assistant for implant dentists in its town. The more likely culprits: the booking widget loads the content with JavaScript, the clinic is missing from the local directories the engine leans on, and its opening hours differ between its site and its map listing. None of that is fixed by better sentences.

1. Check that AI crawlers can read your key pages (robots.txt, firewall, rendered HTML).
2. Ask the questions your customers ask, in several assistants, several times, and note who is cited instead of you.
3. Look at where those cited sources come from: your own site, or reviews, directories and press about you.
4. Make each important claim on your page specific and checkable, in its own short passage.
5. Earn honest mentions on independent sites people already trust.

Questions answered

Sources

1. Aggarwal et al. (2024), the GEO paper, KDD 2024 (arXiv:2311.09735)
2. Google Search Central — AI features and your website
3. Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content

Search engines and AI assistants change often; check the linked documentation for the latest details. Nothing in this post is a promise of rankings, citations or results.

Read next

• The seven stages between a question to an AI and a visit to your website
• Earned media and AI citations: why what others say about you matters so much
• How to get your business cited in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews