A model reads in fragments, not chapters
Start from how the machine works. When someone asks an AI a question, the system is not reciting your whole page back. It is looking for the smallest chunk of text that fully answers the question, and it strongly prefers a chunk that stands on its own. If the answer is buried in the middle of a long section and only makes sense after three paragraphs of build-up, the model has to do extra work to extract it, and it may simply reach for a cleaner source instead.
So the goal is not to write more. It is to write in extractable units: short stretches of text where the question and its answer sit close together, with enough context inside the passage that it still reads correctly when pulled out and shown on its own.
Turn your headings into real questions
The fastest change you can make is in your headings. A heading like "Capabilities" or "Our approach" tells a model nothing about what question the section answers. A heading phrased as the actual question a person would type, "How much does it cost?" or "What is the difference between X and Y?", does two things at once: it tells the reader exactly what they will get, and it hands the model a clean match between a likely query and the passage underneath.
You do not need to turn every heading into a question, and forcing it reads as gimmicky. But across a page, a handful of genuine question headings, each followed by a direct answer, makes your content far easier to match and lift.
Answer first, explain second
This is the habit that matters most, and it runs against how a lot of us were taught to write. The instinct is to set the scene, give background, build toward the point, and land the answer at the end. For a model, that order is backwards. The answer it wants is sitting in your last sentence, behind a wall of preamble it has to wade through first.
Flip it. Put the direct answer in the first sentence under the heading, then use the rest of the section to explain, qualify and add nuance. The reader who only wanted the quick answer gets it immediately, the reader who wants depth keeps reading, and the model gets a clean opening line it can quote without dragging in three sentences of throat-clearing.
Keep sections short and self-contained
Long, sprawling sections are hard to quote because the answer is tangled up with everything around it. A passage that runs for hundreds of words before it gets to the point forces a model to either pull too much or guess where the real answer starts and stops. Neither helps you.
Aim for sections that cover one idea each, in a couple of tight paragraphs, and make sure each one reads correctly on its own. A good test: take any single section, imagine it shown to someone who never saw the rest of the page, and check that it still makes sense and still answers something. If it leans on a definition or a setup from three sections earlier, it is not yet self-contained.
Give the page a spine
Once your page is built from clear question-and-answer sections, make that structure visible. A short table of contents near the top, with links that jump to each section, does more than help human readers skim. It lays out, in one place, every question the page answers, and it gives each answer its own anchor that can be linked to directly.
This is also where a frequently-asked-questions block earns its place. If you have a cluster of small, common questions, grouping them as a proper FAQ, ideally marked up so machines can read it as a list of questions and answers, packages them in exactly the shape an answer engine likes: question, answer, question, answer, no hunting required.
Write plainly and say the obvious things
Clever, allusive copy is hard to quote. A model cannot safely lift a line that only makes sense if you already know your brand voice, your running joke, or the metaphor you set up two paragraphs ago. The passages that get quoted are the ones that state things plainly: what something is, what it does, who it is for, how it compares.
That means writing down the obvious facts you might normally skip because they feel too basic. The one-line definition of what you do. The plain statement of who your product is for. The straight answer to the comparison everyone asks about. Those flat, unglamorous sentences are exactly what gets pulled into an answer and shown to someone who has never heard of you.
How to tell if your content is citable
You can eyeball a single page for all of this. Doing it across a whole site by hand is harder, because the things that hurt you, headings that say nothing, answers buried at the bottom, sections too long to lift, are easy to miss when you wrote them yourself.
HowFindable scans your site for free and checks both sides at once: the technical signals that get you crawled and indexed, and the content signals that decide whether you are easy to quote once you are there. You get two scores and the specific things holding each one back. If you want them fixed, we generate the corrected files and a stronger, answer-first version of your content, ready to upload. The scan costs nothing and is the right place to start.