We touched on writing style, but now specifically consider how an AI plucks information:
- Featured Snippets and Beyond: Aim for featured snippet status on Google for as many QA queries as possible. If you win the snippet, you’re effectively already recognized as a prime answer – Google’s SGE will likely use the same info. Bing also often surfaces the same sites that Google does for quick answers. To do this, incorporate snippet best practices: paragraphs that directly answer definitions (40-60 words), bulleted lists for “list” queries, tables for data comparisons. An example: If the query is “battery life of XYZ phone”, create a table comparing battery capacities of models. Bing’s AI might directly present that table or summary from it.
- Paragraph Focus: Identify key points in your content and ensure each is in its own paragraph, ideally starting with the claim. If an AI is answering “Why does X happen?”, it might extract a single explanatory sentence from you. Make sure the sentence can stand alone. You might even bold the key sentence (to emphasize to readers; it’s unclear if AI pays attention to bold, but it might).
- Use of AI Summaries on Page: One novel approach is to include a brief AI-generated summary on the page (labeled as such). For example: “TL;DR: In summary, [Your Key Answer].” You could hide it behind a “summary” toggle for users or show it if it’s useful. The idea is the summary concisely answers the question. If done well (and fact-checked), an AI might prefer that summary text because it’s tailored to how an AI itself would word an answer. Essentially feeding the AI a pre-written answer to use. This is experimental – if you do it, clearly mark it so as not to confuse users.
- Monitor What Parts of Your Content AI Uses: Through testing (asking AI questions and seeing which of your phrases appear) or using your tracking tools (some advanced ones highlight which part of your page was shown in SGE), identify which snippets from your content are being used and which aren’t. If a particular section never makes it into answers, maybe it’s not phrased optimally or not considered important by the AI. Try reworking it or merging it with a section that does get used.
- Anticipate Multi-Source Answers: Think about how your content could complement others. If a question has various aspects, AI will draw from different sources. Try to answer multiple related aspects on one page (if it makes sense). Or create a series of pages each tackling an aspect but interlink them. If you cover Aspect A and someone else covers B, the AI might cite both. But if you cover A and B, maybe it sticks to just you (and another covering C). For instance, an answer to “benefits and drawbacks of remote work” might cite one source for benefits and another for drawbacks. If your article covers both thoroughly, perhaps it will just use yours for both parts.
Stay Up-to-Date: AI tends to incorporate the latest information available (especially SGE, which can reflect pretty recent content for newsy queries). Update your key pages regularly with fresh insights or data. Even a “Last updated 2025-05-01” note could signal freshness. Google’s systems prioritize fresh content for certain queries; presumably, the AI retrieval does similarly. If you and a competitor have similar content but yours is updated more recently, you might win the retrieval (all else equal).