Answer Engine Optimization: how do you get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews?

Traffic from classic search is down for every site I work on, and the referrals that are growing come from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. There is a whole new acronym industry around this (AEO, GEO). What actually gets a page cited by these answer engines?

From the technical side, the boring things matter most, because the AI systems read pages through crawlers that are far less patient than a browser:

• Content in the HTML, not rendered later by JavaScript. If it needs a click or a script to appear, assume it does not exist.
• Fast and crawlable: no login walls, sensible robots.txt. Decide deliberately which bots you allow: GPTBot, PerplexityBot and friends for the answer engines, Google-Extended if you accept Gemini training. Google's AI Overviews use the normal Googlebot, so you cannot opt out of them separately from search.
• Structured data: Article with author and dates, FAQ where it fits, Organization, breadcrumbs. Schema.org via JSON-LD.
• Headings that are the question, followed by the answer in the first sentence. The models pull the passage, not the page.
• Dates and authorship visible. Fresh, attributed content wins ties.
• An llms.txt file is an emerging convention, cheap to add, but nobody serious relies on it yet.

Basically: everything old-school SEO said about clean pages, taken seriously this time.

And from the content side, what I have seen move the needle:

• Original information: your own data, a test you ran, a number nobody else has. Answer engines love to cite the source of a fact.
• Being talked about elsewhere. Mentions on other sites, in forums and on Reddit feed the models' sense that you are a real entity. Forum threads get cited constantly, which is partly why places like this one matter.
• Answer the question completely in one place, then stop. Pages that ramble get skipped for the ones that are quotable.
• Measure it: filter referrals by chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and the Bing/Copilot domains in analytics, and search your brand inside the tools once a month.

What does not work: keyword stuffing for the bots, fake FAQ blocks, and posting the same answer in fifty places. The same things that were spam before are spam now.