Growth
2026-10-07 · 9 min read
Sapun Lamichhane
Founder & CEO of Arcetis
AI assistants pull from indexed, crawlable content that is clear, well-structured, and corroborated across multiple sources, not from advertising spend or vague brand reputation. They tend to favor content that directly and completely answers a specific question, rather than content that only gestures at an answer.
This means the same fundamentals that help real users find useful information, clarity, completeness, and accuracy, are also what gets content surfaced and cited by these systems.
This also means content written purely to game traditional search rankings, stuffed with repeated phrases or structured around search volume rather than genuine usefulness, tends to perform poorly here too, since it reads as low quality to both human readers and the systems summarizing it.
“ChatGPT does not cite the business that paid the most, it cites the source that answered the question most clearly and was corroborated elsewhere.”
Use clear headings, direct question-and-answer formatting, and proper schema markup, such as Organization, FAQ, or Product schema, so automated systems can parse what your content actually says. Avoid burying key facts deep inside long unstructured paragraphs, or relying on content that only renders after heavy JavaScript loads, since that can make it harder for some systems to read reliably.
None of this requires rebuilding a website from scratch, it is usually a matter of restructuring existing content more clearly and adding the right markup.
A simple test worth trying is reading your own key pages as if you were a system looking for one specific fact, if it takes real effort to locate the actual answer among marketing language, restructuring that page is likely worth the time.
AI systems tend to cross-reference your website against your Google Business Profile, directory listings, review platforms, and social profiles. If your name, services, location, or pricing range differ across these, it reduces the confidence any single source gets cited with.
Auditing and aligning these details across every platform your business appears on is tedious but genuinely effective, inconsistency is one of the most common and most fixable reasons a business does not get cited confidently.
This extends to numerical details specifically, if your website says a service starts at one price and your Google Business Profile or a directory listing shows a different figure, that mismatch is exactly the kind of inconsistency that undermines confidence in both sources.
A page that half-answers a question tends to get skipped in favor of a competitor's fuller answer. For example, a page about service costs that avoids giving any real numbers is unlikely to get cited when someone asks an AI assistant how much that service actually costs.
Completeness matters more than length, a short page that fully and specifically answers one question often performs better than a long page that talks around several questions without directly answering any of them.
This is also why thin, templated pages built purely to target a keyword tend to underperform here even more than they do in traditional search, since there is no real information underneath the structure for an AI system to extract and cite.
Being referenced by credible third-party sources, news coverage, review platforms, industry directories, feeds into how AI systems build trust in information about a business, more than self-published claims alone ever can.
Buying fake reviews or manufactured citations is a real risk, not a shortcut, inconsistent or clearly fabricated signals can actively undermine trust in a business's information rather than help it.
Genuine case studies, detailed write-ups of real projects, and transparent explanations of how a service actually works tend to earn more organic mentions over time than promotional content, simply because other sites and publications find them more useful to reference.
Consider a clinic in Pokhara wanting to be the answer when someone asks an AI assistant for the best dermatologist in the city. That requires structured service pages with real detail, consistent name and location information across its Google Business Profile and relevant directories, genuine patient reviews, and clear, specific pricing or service information rather than vague marketing language.
Arcetis runs Nepal's first dedicated AEO and GEO practice and does exactly this kind of structured optimization work for businesses that want to be findable in this new way, not just in traditional search results.
The underlying principle applies to almost any Nepali business trying to be found this way, restaurants, clinics, service providers, retailers, the mechanics are the same even though the specific details of what to make consistent and complete will differ by industry.
No, there is no advertising mechanism to buy citations in AI assistant responses. Citation depends on how clearly, completely, and consistently your information is presented across the sources these systems draw from.
It works alongside SEO. The two share many fundamentals, clear structure, accurate information, genuine authority, but AEO and GEO specifically focus on being cited directly by AI systems rather than only on ranking for clicks.
There is no fixed timeline, since it depends on how established and consistent your information already is across the web. Businesses that already have strong, consistent, well-structured information online tend to see results faster than those starting with inconsistent or thin information.