Answer engines don't rank links — they cite sources. After auditing hundreds of AI answers across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, we've distilled the 15 signals that consistently decide who gets cited.

Foundation (signals 1–5)

  1. Entity clarity — Is your company a defined entity? Organization schema, consistent name and logo everywhere, a Wikidata entry where possible.
  2. Structured data — Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article and BreadcrumbList on every relevant page.
  3. E-E-A-T evidence — Named authors, credentials, first-hand case data and clear editorial ownership.
  4. Performance — Strong Core Web Vitals. AI crawlers fetch like humans, and slow sites get skipped.
  5. Crawlability — Clean robots.txt, sitemap, an llms.txt file, and no blocked critical assets.

Content (signals 6–11)

  1. Direct answers — Every page opens with a 40–60 word answer before the elaboration.
  2. Q&A hubs — Question-first content mapped to the phrasing people actually type.
  3. Statistics & data — Original numbers get quoted. Vague claims don't.
  4. Quote-able phrasing — One clean sentence per key idea, easy for a model to lift.
  5. Freshness — Updated dates and versioned content. AI favors recent information.
  6. Sentiment checks — Monitor how AI describes you, and fix negatives at the source.

Authority (signals 12–15)

  1. Corroboration — Multiple independent sources saying the same thing about you.
  2. Digital PR — Mentions on the industry publications AI engines already trust.
  3. Reviews & social proof — Consistent positive signals on G2, Trustpilot, LinkedIn and Google.
  4. Monitoring loop — Weekly brand-mention tracking across engines, treated like a ranking report.

The bottom line

No single signal wins AI visibility — the pattern wins. Foundation gets you retrievable; content gets you quotable; authority gets you cited. Cover all 15 and you become the answer.