How to write content that gets quoted by ChatGPT and AI Overviews

Most web writing warms up before it answers: a hook, some context, a nod to why the question matters, then finally the fact. That structure is fine for a human who scrolls. It's close to useless for a system extracting a passage, because the extractable unit is usually a sentence or two, and if your first two sentences are throat-clearing, there's nothing there to lift.

The fix is mechanical. Write the heading as the question. Write the first sentence as the direct answer to that exact question, using the same words. Everything else in the section is elaboration the model can include or drop.

An AI system generating an answer is choosing between sources it can quote confidently and sources it can't. A sentence with a real figure, a unit and a date is something it can restate as fact. A sentence with 'varies', 'depends', 'a range of' or 'approximately' gives it nothing to commit to, so it either paraphrases you into something vaguer or skips you for a competitor who gave a number.

This is the single biggest lever in this guide. Go through your existing pages and find every sentence that describes a price, a duration, a distance, a percentage or a count using a qualifier instead of a figure. Replace the qualifier with the actual number, and if the number genuinely varies, give the range plus the specific driver of the variation.

An FAQ block does two jobs at once: it's a good reading experience, and it's pre-chunked for retrieval. Each Q&A pair is already the shape a generative engine wants, a bounded question and a self-contained answer.

Write the question as a person would type or say it, not a tidied-up version. Write the answer to stand alone: someone reading only that answer, with no heading and no surrounding page, should get the complete point in the first sentence.

Retrieval systems generally work on chunks of a page, not the whole document, so a page written as one flowing argument is harder to extract from than a page built as self-contained blocks under question-shaped headings.

Test this yourself: delete a section's heading and everything before and after it, and read only what's left. If it still makes sense, it's well-formed for extraction. If it leans on 'as mentioned above' or an unexplained 'this', a model quoting it out of context will garble the meaning or skip it.

A lot of content padding isn't wrong, it's just dilutive. Sentences like 'this is an important consideration for many travelers' add length without adding anything a model can quote, and they push the actually-quotable sentence further from the heading.

Run this test on a draft: for every sentence, ask whether deleting it loses a fact, a number, a name or an instruction. If deleting it loses nothing, it's fluff. Cutting it usually makes the page better to read, too.

If a question implies steps, use a genuinely ordered list with short imperative items, not a paragraph with 'first... then... finally' buried in it. If it implies a comparison, use an actual HTML table with a header row, not a paragraph listing differences. This isn't about AI Overviews specifically, it's about giving any extraction system, human skimmer or machine, a structure it can lift cleanly instead of one it has to parse out of running text.

There's no dashboard that tells you whether ChatGPT or AI Overviews are quoting a given page, so the only real feedback loop is manual. Pick your five or six most important questions, and run them through Google (checking for an AI Overview), ChatGPT and Perplexity on a recurring basis. Note whether you're cited, what exact passage got quoted if you are, and whether a competitor's more specific number beat your vaguer one.

This also tells you which of your own pages are already well-formed. If a passage gets quoted verbatim, that's the shape to replicate elsewhere on the site: same directness, same specificity, same self-containedness.