7-Step AI Citation Audit Checklist

Win more AI citations. Make your pages easy to crawl, rank, and cite

This is a subscriber-only companion piece for AI Citation Ranking Factors. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to start there.

This represents the next step: when we understand which features are associated with AI citations, how do we put this into practice?

Earning AI citations is mostly good SEO, with a few extra steps. Based on our database of case studies, experiments, and other evidence, there are a number of steps you can take to increase your chances of winning AI citations. You want to:

1. Make your content accessible to AI engines

2. Rank for the main query

3. Find and target related queries

4. Choose the right content format

5. Match the answer to the query

6. Put your primary answers at the top

7. Make the page easy to cite

Important: You should understand that AI citations are probabilistic and aren’t as stable as traditional search results. AI citations change often, even day to day. The goal is not to permanently “win” AI citations, but to increase your chances of appearing over time.

For review, here are the AI Citation Ranking Factors.