How to Build a Website AI Will Cite

For AI to cite your website, three things have to be true: AI can reach it, understand it and trust it. Reaching it depends on technical crawlability, understanding it depends on structure, and trusting it depends on information that is consistent and traceable. The four technical points below are where those three things actually land.

Structured data (Schema / JSON-LD): so AI can understand you

Before AI can cite you, it has to understand accurately who you are, what you do, and what your address and phone number are. A person reading your page can work that out; AI relies on structured data.

How to do it: add Schema.org markup to your page code. These are the types used most often:

Organization (company information)

Company name, website, logo, description, contact details, address, founding date. For example: a company marks up its name, its address — "Room 1606, Building B2, China Merchants Smart City, Guangming District, Shenzhen" — its phone number and its email as structured data. When AI crawls the page it reads that information directly, rather than guessing.

Product / Service (products and services)

Product names, service scope, price ranges (where they exist). This tells AI what you actually sell and do.

FAQPage (Q&A)

Mark up your FAQs as question-and-answer pairs. AI cites this one-question-one-answer structure more than any other.

llms.txt: an instruction sheet for AI crawlers

llms.txt is a file written specifically for AI crawlers and placed in your site's root directory. It tells AI directly who the site belongs to, what it does, which pages matter most and where the core information sits.

How to do it: write a short llms.txt covering:

• a one-sentence introduction to the company
• your core business and strengths
• links to important pages (homepage, key sections, contact page)
• contact details

With it in place, AI crawlers get to know you faster and more accurately — far more efficient than letting them crawl the whole site unaided.

TDK, H1 and content structure: making information easy to extract

This layer is about being content-friendly. Three points:

Accurate TDK

Fill in Title, Description and Keywords properly — don't leave the system defaults. Put your most important keyword near the front of the Title, because both AI and search engines weight the start of a title more heavily.

One H1, and it matches the page topic

One H1 per page, and its text is the topic of that page — no extras, nothing vague. For example, an article about how exporters do AI search optimization should carry exactly that as its H1, not filler like "Welcome to our site".

Structured body content

Lead with the conclusion, layer the page with H2 and H3, use lists, tables and Q&A. In one line: content written for people can take its time; content written for AI has to get to the point.

Technical crawlability: so AI can reach you

However good the content is, it counts for nothing if AI cannot reach it. Three basics:

A working sitemap

Keep the sitemap complete and up to date so AI crawlers can discover every page.

robots.txt that doesn't block by accident

Check that no important page is blocked by robots.txt.

Clean canonical tags

Settle on a single primary domain — www or non-www, not both — so AI doesn't treat the same content as two sites and dilute its weight.

These four technical points, together with content production and source building, are what make a complete AI search optimization programme. Yihang Network's GEO work covers the whole chain, from diagnosis through to implementation. To learn more, see our GEO full-funnel marketing.