Key findings
- Ranking on Google and being quoted by an AI assistant are different games.
- Assistants lift short, self-contained, factual sentences, so lead with the answer.
- Your robots.txt and llms.txt decide whether AI can read you at all.
- Models reason about entities, not keywords, so consistent naming wins.
When someone asks an assistant a question, it does not show ten blue links. It writes an answer and, increasingly, names its sources. The question for your brand is simple. Are you one of the names?
What actually gets quoted
Assistants lift self-contained, factual sentences. A paragraph that answers one question cleanly, in plain words, with no setup, is easy to quote. A paragraph that needs the three before it for context is not.
- Lead with the answer. Put the conclusion in the first sentence, then explain.
- Keep sentences short. A model lifts a clean sentence more readily than a nested one.
- State facts plainly. Dates, definitions, and steps travel well. Marketing adjectives do not.
Be machine-readable, on purpose
Assistants and their crawlers still read the response first. Two files decide whether they can read you at all: your robots.txt and your llms.txt. The first must allow the AI crawlers. The second points them at the pages you want quoted.
You can check both in minutes. Our free tools read your title tags, schema, and heading structure the way a crawler does, so you fix what the machine actually sees.
Entities, not keywords
A model does not match keywords. It reasons about entities: who you are, what you do, and what connects you to a topic. Consistent naming across your site, clean Organization schema, and links from pages that already have authority all tell the model the same story.
The brands quoted by AI are the ones whose facts are easy to find, easy to read, and consistent everywhere they appear.
How to know it is working
Ask the assistants the questions your customers ask, and note when your brand appears in the answer. It is manual, and it is honest. Track the questions you win and the ones you do not, then build the pages that close the gap.
See this on your own site, for free.
The audit runs this exact check against your live pages.
CraftDigitally Team
We run and grow our own B2B sites, then write up what we learn. Every claim here is one we check against a live site first.
