Get found on Google. Get cited by ChatGPT.

Usually one of three reasons, and they are diagnosable in an afternoon. The site renders in the browser, so the crawlers behind these assistants receive an almost empty file. Or the pages exist and answer nothing directly, so there is no self-contained passage worth quoting. Or the answer is there and buried under four paragraphs of preamble. A model assembling an answer needs a clear explanation it can attribute, and copy written to persuade gives it nothing to lift.

Most of the work is identical and the target is different. Both reward a page that answers a real question cleanly, in HTML a crawler can read, from a source it can attribute. SEO then asks whether Google will place you in a list. Answer engine optimization asks whether an assistant will quote you and name you, where there is no list and often no click. Anyone selling it as an entirely new discipline is overcharging. Anyone saying nothing has changed has not watched how their buyers search.

Ranking and being quoted are decided differently. A ranking is a position in a list, which authority and links heavily influence. A citation is a model choosing which passage to lift, which depends on whether a clean, complete answer exists on the page and whether it can be attributed. A page can hold position 3 and contain no liftable passage, because the answer is spread across five paragraphs. Pages that get quoted answer the question in the first sixty words and name their subject.

Yes, and it is easier than ranking for the same term. Ranking is a contest for a fixed number of positions where domain authority is a heavy input, so a new site waits months. A generated answer has no fixed positions, so a model takes whichever explanation is clearest and most attributable, and a small site can have the clearest explanation. Being new is not a disadvantage here. The constraint is different: your pages have to be in an index these crawlers actually read.

No, and nobody can. A citation is a model's choice at the moment someone asks, and there is no ranking to buy, no submission to file and no index position to hold. What can be controlled is whether the crawlers can read your pages at all, whether a self-contained answer exists for them to lift, and whether enough related pages exist that you come up across different phrasings of the same question. Better Marketing reports what happened against a fixed prompt set rather than forecasting it.

By fixing a prompt set and re-running it, not with a rank tracker, because an answer is generated fresh each time and has no stable position. Better Marketing fixes ten prompts a buyer would realistically ask, runs them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews on a schedule, and records each result as cited with a link, named without one, or absent. It is coarser than a rankings report. It is also the only version that produces a comparable series over time.

llms.txt is a plain-text file describing your site for AI crawlers, and the honest position is that nobody has demonstrated it changes citation. Better Marketing publishes one because it costs almost nothing and the option is worth holding. What we will not do is present it as the reason you get cited. The two things that reliably move citation are whether a crawler can read your HTML at all, and whether the page contains a self-contained answer worth lifting.

Reddit threads are among the sources AI assistants reach for most often, which is why Reddit is worth the discipline it demands. The discipline is the point. You cannot link to yourself without being removed, so the only durable approach is answering questions properly and letting people click your profile. That makes it slow and hard to fake. It also means a good Reddit answer keeps earning visibility long after a LinkedIn post has scrolled away. Astroturfing gets caught and costs the account.

Write, structure and measure. In practice that means new pages answering questions your buyers are asking, rewrites of pages that are close but buried, the schema and internal linking that hold it together, and the prompt re-run that shows what moved. Not included: paid search, bought links, or a promise of a specific position by a specific date. Better Marketing does not run ads at all, so nothing here depends on a budget staying switched on. The mix shifts over time, and early months are weighted toward new pages while later months are weighted toward rewrites.

The tactics will change and the requirement will not. Every version of this so far has rewarded the same thing: a page that answers a real question clearly, in markup a machine can parse, from a source it can attribute. That was true for featured snippets, it is true for AI Overviews, and it will be true for whatever replaces them. What ages badly is anything built to game one specific format, which is also why this approach is the slower one.