How I got a site cited by ChatGPT — and why that's the new SEO
Last month one of my sites, colorcombinations.org, roughly doubled its visitors in a single window — from 56 to 123. The interesting part wasn't the number. It was where they came from: ChatGPT and DuckDuckGo's AI answers, not Google's blue links.
That's the shift almost nobody is pricing in yet. Around 60% of searches now end without a click — people read the AI's summary and move on. If your page isn't inside that summary, you're invisible, no matter how well you "rank." Optimizing for rankings while the traffic quietly moves to answers is the mistake I made for two years.
So here's the playbook I've been refining across 42 sites for getting cited by AI answer engines — GEO, generative engine optimization:
- Be extractable. AI engines quote sentences, not pages. Write section headers as complete, quotable claims, and put one clean fact per block. If a model can lift a single sentence and have it stand on its own, you're citable.
- Saturate structured data. Dataset, FAQPage, ItemList, SpeakableSpecification, Article — schema is how the machine knows what each thing is. My best-performing pages carry six schema types.
- Map a finite dataset to real demand. This is the one everyone gets wrong. I ran the identical technique on two sites. One — a source-vs-source comparison — gets about three human clicks a month, because nobody searches for it. The other — state-by-state reading lists — gets over a thousand. Same machinery, opposite result. Validate that humans actually want the answer before you build the pages.
- Get corroborated. Answer engines trust facts that appear in more than one place. The same claim on your site, plus a genuine Reddit answer, plus a profile, compounds your odds of being the cited source.
- Stay fresh and fast. Dated content and clean Core Web Vitals both feed citation. Stale, slow pages get skipped.
The new game isn't ranking on Google. It's being the source the AI quotes.
If you run a content brand, audit one thing this week: ask ChatGPT a question your site should own, and see whether you're in the answer. If you're not, that gap is your whole roadmap.
I'm figuring this out in public across the fleet, one site at a time. If you're working on the same problem, I'd genuinely like to compare notes.
