Citation engineering is one slice of GEO and AEO: the part that is only about getting named as the source in an AI answer. It is not local-SEO “citation building” (directory listings) — same word, different job. This is for GEO and content people who want the citation itself to be the deliverable.
Citation is not ranking
About 12% of the URLs AI assistants cite also rank in Google’s top 10 for that prompt. Read that again: a spec page can be quoted by ChatGPT without ranking anywhere. That gap is the entire opportunity — citation is worth engineering on its own, separate from rank.
Build things engines must cite
The most citable thing you can publish is reference data: interchange and cross-reference tables, spec databases, compatibility charts. You already own it — it is sitting in the PIM and the ERP. You just haven’t published it as flat, crawlable HTML instead of a PDF or a lookup widget. Do that and you become the answer to “what replaces X?”
Structure for extraction
Engines lift self-contained passages. Write so one paragraph is a complete answer, name the entities (part numbers, standards, brands), and add a clear source line. An answer that only makes sense after three paragraphs of run-up does not survive being pulled out.
Corroborate across sources
Engines trust a fact more when it shows up the same way in several places they already weight. Get your key facts stated identically on the manufacturer’s pages, the directories, the reputable third-party sites. That is corroboration — still not directory citations.
Track and repair attribution
Watch which URLs get cited for your prompts, and watch for misattribution — the named source is not always the real one, and the error rates are not small. When an engine credits your interchange data to a competitor, or states it wrong, that is a correction job, not a vanity metric.