AI SEO & Citation Optimization Engine

What it does

Produces a concrete optimization plan that makes your content discoverable, extractable, and citable by AI search engines (Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot). Traditional SEO gets you ranked; AI SEO gets you cited — a well-structured page can be cited even when it ranks on page 2 or 3.

The flow has four stages. (1) AI Visibility Audit: 10-20 priority queries are tested platform by platform; whether you're cited and where competitors get cited is captured in a matrix. (2) Extractability Check: each priority page is scored against a checklist — first-paragraph definition, self-contained 40-60 word answer blocks, sourced statistics, comparison tables, FAQ, and schema. (3) Three-Pillar Strategy: Structure (extractable block patterns), Authority (Princeton GEO levers), Presence (third-party footprint on Wikipedia, Reddit, G2, YouTube). (4) Machine-readable layer: robots.txt AI-bot access (GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended), schema markup, llms.txt, pricing.md, and the OKF bundle.

When to use it

• Your brand never appears in AI answers, or competitors appear where you don't.
• You want a systematic answer to "how do I optimize for ChatGPT/Perplexity/AI Overviews?"
• Zero-click search is eroding your traffic and you want to shift to citation visibility.
• You're planning content and want to know which formats (comparison, definitive guide, original research) raise citation share.
• AI buying agents can't "read" your product (JS-rendered pricing, contact-sales walls) and you need to fix it.

Method / frameworks

• Princeton GEO research (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024): ranks 9 methods by visibility lift — cite sources +40%, add statistics +37%, quotes +30%, authoritative tone +25%, fluency +15-30%; keyword stuffing -10% (actively harmful). The 2025 SAGEO follow-up shows effects are smaller but still real under production retrieval.
• Three-Pillar model: Structure (extractability) · Authority (citation-worthiness) · Presence (be where AI looks).
• E-E-A-T — the foundation of Google's AI features.
• Query Fan-Out: Google generating concurrent related queries from one; cover the topical cluster, not single keywords.
• Separates Google's official stance ("write for people, no AI-specific markup, scaled-content-abuse risk") from the multi-platform reality (ChatGPT/Perplexity/Claude reward extractable structure).
• OKF (Open Knowledge Format, v0.1) and the machine-readable file protocol layer.