There are two ways an AI assistant can send you business. It can recommend your company by name when someone asks who to hire, which I covered in the AI SEO article. Or it can cite something you wrote as a source when answering a question in your field. This piece is about the second one, and if you sell expertise for a living, it may quietly be the more valuable of the two.
When a consultant, a lawyer or an advisor is cited by ChatGPT as the source for an answer, something happens that no ad can buy: a machine with no stake in the outcome presented you as the person who knows. People notice the source links. They click them. And they arrive already half convinced.
Write the page an assistant wishes existed
Assistants get asked questions, so they hunt for pages that resolve questions. Before writing anything, say out loud the exact question your page answers. “What should a service agreement include for freelance consultants in Canada?” is a page an assistant can use. “Thoughts on client relationships” is not.
Then answer it in the first two hundred words. Assistants skim the way impatient humans do, and a page that buries its answer under a long introduction loses to a page that leads with it. You can elaborate for two thousand words afterwards; just put the usable answer first.
Say things, plural, that can be lifted whole
An assistant builds its answer from sentences it can extract and trust. Every claim you make in a complete, self-contained sentence is a candidate for citation. “In Quebec, a contract of service does not require a written document to be valid” can be quoted. A vague paragraph that circles the same idea cannot. Go through your best pages and count the sentences that could stand alone as facts. That count is a decent proxy for how citable the page is; I explained the selection mechanics in how AI assistants choose sources.
Put a person behind the words
Assistants weigh who is speaking. A page signed by a named professional, on a site that says who that person is and why they would know, beats an anonymous post making identical claims. Your name on the article, an about page with your real background, and consistent identity across your site and profiles all feed this. Expertise that hides has no advantage over expertise that does not exist.
Cover your topic, then stop
One good article on a subject is a data point. Eight articles that cover a subject from different angles make your site the place where that subject lives, and both Google and assistants respond to that concentration. This is why I structure client content in clusters around a small number of topics instead of scattering posts about whatever came to mind. Depth on a narrow field wins against breadth on everything, especially for a small site.
What to skip
Do not write for machines at the expense of people; a page that reads like a database gets no links, no shares and no return visits, and those still matter. Do not chase volume with thin generated posts, because assistants synthesize across sources and thin content simply never gets picked. And do not expect movement in a week. Citations follow from being reliably useful on a topic over months.
Content structured to be cited is part of what I build at Studio Squalli, alongside the technical layer that makes it readable to machines in the first place. The free audit will tell you whether your existing pages are citable now, or invisible.