How do I write content that AI assistants will quote?
Assistants extract passages, not pages. Everything follows from that one fact.
Write so that any single paragraph can be lifted out and still make sense. That means a question as the heading, the answer in the first two sentences beneath it, concrete specifics rather than generalities, and no dependence on what came before.
The unit is the passage
When an assistant answers a question, it is not recommending your page — it is quoting a piece of it and attributing the quote. A page can be excellent and never produce a quotable passage, in which case it gets read and passed over.
Test any paragraph by copying it into a blank document. If it still makes sense and answers something, it can be quoted. If it begins "This is why the second approach works better", it cannot.
The structure that works
## How long should a meta description be?
Aim for 150 to 160 characters. Google truncates by pixel width
rather than character count, so this is a guideline rather than a
hard limit, and mobile results cut sooner at around 120.
[explanation, caveats and detail follow]Three things are happening there: the heading is the question as someone would ask it, the answer arrives immediately, and the answer contains numbers. All three are what make it extractable.
Specific beats comprehensive
| Weaker | Stronger |
|---|---|
| "Keep descriptions reasonably short" | "150 to 160 characters" |
| "Modern browsers support this" | "Supported since Chrome 105 and Safari 16.4" |
| "This can improve performance" | "Removing it cut our largest contentful paint from 3.4s to 1.9s" |
| "Several options are available" | "Three options: X, Y and Z. Use X unless you need Y's wildcard support." |
The right-hand column gets quoted. The left-hand column is unquotable because there is no claim to attribute.
Split, do not consolidate
The instinct to build one definitive mega-guide works against you here. A page covering twelve questions competes for none of them cleanly. Twelve pages, each answering one question in the title, each with the answer at the top, will out-perform it for citation — and usually for search too.
Keep the guide if it is genuinely useful as a whole, and link the individual pages from it.
Make it safe to cite
An assistant citing you is putting its answer's accuracy on your page. Things that make that easier:
- A named author with real expertise, and an organisation behind them.
- A visible, honest date.
- Sources linked for claims you did not originate.
- Explicit limits — saying what you did not test is a credibility signal, not a weakness.
- No contradictions between the page and its own structured data.
What our audit reports about this
Every item below is measured directly, not inferred. Run it against your own site and the result names the exact rule or header responsible.
- Whether headings are phrased as questions and whether answers appear directly beneath them.
- Whether FAQ structure is present and machine-readable.
- Density of concrete specifics against page length.
- Whether authorship, dates and organisation are declared in structured data.
For agents and scripts, the same measurement is at
/api/v1/faq?url=yoursite.com —
see the API documentation.
Related questions
Does FAQ schema make me more quotable?
It helps machines find the question-and-answer pairs, but the structure has to genuinely exist on the page. Schema describing questions that are not visible is a policy violation and does not work.
Should every page be a Q&A?
No. This applies to informational content. Product pages, landing pages and documentation have different jobs. Apply it where someone arrives with a question.
How long should the answer paragraph be?
One to three sentences. Long enough to be complete, short enough to quote whole. If it needs more, the extra belongs in the paragraphs after it.
Read next
How do I get my site cited by AI assistants?
The mechanics that must be right, then the content decisions that actually earn the citation — in the order worth doing them.
ReadHow do I add an FAQ section that search engines actually use?
Real questions, visible answers, correct markup — in that order. Schema on questions nobody asked achieves nothing.
ReadWhy does my content look AI-generated?
The specific patterns that make writing read as machine-produced, and what to do about them — whether or not a model was involved.
ReadWhat is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
Optimising to be quoted inside an AI answer rather than ranked in a list of links — what genuinely differs from SEO, and what is the same work under a new name.
Read