June 11, 2026
While conversational interfaces and AI Overviews have had an impact on clicks, landing a citation is still incredibly valuable. There have been countless studies over the past couple of years investigating how AI search tools select citation sources, but many of them are simply observations or lack the necessary data to make any solid conclusions, and this has led to confusion over what really influences AI visibility.
SEO consultant Cyrus Shepard has solved this problem by analysing 54 published studies to identify which factors consistently appear to influence whether a website gets cited by AI systems.
The findings, unsurprisingly, suggest that traditional SEO still reigns supreme, but let’s take a closer look at the results.
Here’s a graph of the full AI citation ranking factors:
Most of the strongest citation signals are the same as those that help pages perform well in traditional search results. There are some differences, but on the whole the basics of SEO are enough to keep you present in AI search.
URL accessibility was the highest-rated factor. You need to ensure pages can be crawled and accessed by AI systems. If a page is unavailable to search engines or AI crawlers, the likelihood of achieving a citation is low. As more AI crawlers make their way onto the scene, it's becoming increasingly important to ensure your AI access settings aren't limiting your visibility.
Traditional search rankings were also very important, highlighting the idea that pages which already perform well in organic search are more likely to be referenced in AI-generated answers. Essentially, if you’re not visible in traditional search, you’re unlikely to be visible in AI search.
When choosing sources, AI systems are pretty selective. Pages that closely match a user’s questions and directly answer the query are cited more frequently than broader or loosely related content. This doesn’t just apply to the actual query, but also the related searches AI systems perform to build a response. Your content needs to genuinely answer a question and not just exist to hit keyword targets.
Several factors were also related to structure.
It seems AI systems favour content that is:
AI tools don’t always process an entire webpage, so putting important information first and keeping structures logical is key.
Clear facts, statistics, and recommendations perform better than vague or ambiguous statements. The more precise and verifiable your information is, the more useful it is to AI systems, increasing your likelihood of becoming a citation source.
Trust signals aren’t as well rated as technical and relevance factors, but they are still influential. There is evidence that, like Google, AI systems favour already credible and authoritative sources like established brands and well-known publishers. Focusing on E.E.A.T guidelines is important for AI visibility as well as traditional search.
One thing that is interesting, especially since it’s one of the most debated topics in the SEO world at the moment, is the influence of structured data and LLMs.txt.
Although it doesn’t seem to have a huge impact, structured data does appear to have a fairly consistent relationship with AI citations.
LLMs.txt, on the other hand, not so much. Despite receiving plenty of media attention, there was very little credible evidence that implementing an LLMs.txt file directly improves citation performance.
AI keeps evolving and people are constantly trying to come up with new optimisation techniques to dominate AI search. However, hopping on these trends isn’t likely to get you very far.
Your organic search performance has a huge impact on your search visibility, and a lot of the things that AI systems seem to be rewarding are very similar to what Google and other major search engines look out for.
If you keep producing accessible, useful content that both humans and machines can understand, and build a credible, authoritative brand, you will improve your chances of becoming visible in both traditional and AI search results.
If you’d like expert help implementing an effective SEO strategy will help you improve your AI visibility, get in touch with us today.
