The search results page is no longer just a list of links. Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Claude, Grok, and Perplexity now assemble answers on the fly, often citing the sources that shaped them. For CMOs and CROs, that means winning mind-share without always winning the click. This playbook shows how to become the reference those engines trust.

AI answers are eating the click, yet influence is up for grabs

Since Google rolled out AI Overviews in mid-2024, organic click-through rates on informational queries have fallen by about 34.5 percent. Meanwhile, ChatGPT Search (Feb 2025) and Claude’s new web-search mode highlight linked sources by default, rewarding the few brands that show up consistently. For growth leaders this isn’t vanity; cited visibility correlates with faster deal cycles once prospects finally raise a hand.

What makes an LLM choose your page?

Answer engines first run a retrieval-and-rank pipeline—Google patents call the expansion step “query fan-out”—before they generate prose. Pages that win usually share four traits, echoed in Google’s own AI-search guidance: original insight, clear passages, machine-readable structure, and a trusted domain.

• Original insight, not commodity copy. Unique data outperforms scraped summaries.
• Clear, unambiguous passages. Short declarative paragraphs are easiest for models to quote.
• Machine-readable structure. FAQPage, HowTo, and Article schema create ready-made answer blocks.
• Stable, reputable domain. Long-lived sites with external mentions beat single-page wonders.

The five-part content recipe that gets you quoted

Map every buying-stage question your CFO, CMO, or CRO audience asks. Treat each answer as a self-contained knowledge card that can live on its own, be updated quickly, and stand up to fact-checking. Introduce each list below with context, then work through the ingredients.

1. Lead with the takeaway in ≤ 40 words

Front-load the key statistic or decision rule so the model spots it early.

2. Back it immediately with first-party proof

Publish proprietary benchmarks or anonymised CRM aggregates to become the canonical reference.

3. Layer context in conversational sub-heads

Question-style H2/H3 tags (“Why do AI Overviews suppress CTR?”) align queries to headings.

4. Mark it up

Implement JSON-LD (Article, FAQPage, Dataset) and wrap inline stats in <cite> so LLMs recognise boundaries.

5. Refresh on a sprint cadence

Perplexity ranks freshness high; its online models recrawl constantly, so even minor edits reset the clock.

Technical hygiene that makes or breaks retrieval

Sitemaps 2.0. Maintain a lean AI-only sitemap and update <lastmod> on every refresh.

Robots signals. Unless legal insists, don’t block GPT-Bo