AI answer engines don't rank ten blue links. They lift one or two passages and cite them. This walks through how that selection happens and what makes a page quotable.
How retrieval works
Before a model writes an answer, a retriever pulls candidate passages from an index. Pages that load clean HTML and answer the question in the first sentence get pulled more often. See our retrieval primer for the mechanics, or this external paper.
The retriever cares about a few signals:
- Clean, crawlable HTML with real text, not text baked into images.
- A direct answer near the top of the section.
- Structured data that confirms what the page is about.
What makes a passage quotable
Write the answer as a standalone sentence. Here's the pattern engines reward:
<p>Citation engineering is the practice of structuring content so AI engines quote it.</p>Classic SEO vs AI search
| What matters | Classic SEO | AI search |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of value | The ranked page | The quoted passage |
| Winner count | Ten blue links | One or two citations |