What actually makes a page citable
Assistants quote passages, not pages. The unit that gets cited is a paragraph that answers a specific question completely, without needing the surrounding article for context. A page organised as a narrative — building an argument over eight hundred words before the payoff — is excellent for a human reader and nearly useless as a citation source.
This does not mean writing for machines. It means front-loading: state the answer, then explain it. A page that opens with its conclusion serves the impatient human and the extraction model equally well, and there is no page we have written where doing this made it worse to read.
The consistency problem nobody budgets for
Assistants weight information that agrees with itself across independent sources. If your site says one thing, your LinkedIn profile says another, and three directory listings each carry a different service description, none of it is confidently citable — the model has no basis for choosing between them.
This is why the highest-leverage GEO work is often not on your website at all. It is making the twenty places that already describe your company agree with each other: directory profiles, review sites, partner pages, social bios, old press mentions. Unglamorous work, rarely proposed by agencies because it is hard to bill as a recurring retainer, and consistently effective.
How to measure work that produces no clicks
This is the reporting problem that causes good programmes to be cancelled. If a buyer asks an assistant for recommendations, reads a summary that includes you, and then searches your name directly, your analytics records a branded direct visit. The work that created the demand is invisible to the tool measuring it.
- Track branded search volume as a primary metric. Assistant mentions produce searches for your name, and that is where the effect surfaces first.
- Query the assistants directly, on a schedule. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI surfaces the questions your buyers ask, monthly, and record whether you appear and what is said about you.
- Watch impressions and average position in Search Console independently of clicks. Rising impressions against flat clicks is evidence of answer-surface visibility, not failure.
- Instrument the first conversation. Ask every new enquiry how they found you and store it as a field, not as anecdote.
- Accept a longer feedback loop. This compounds across quarters; judged month to month it will always look like it is not working.
What we would do in the first ninety days
Fix the technical floor first — rendering, speed, structured data, crawler access — because nothing downstream compensates for a page an engine cannot read or will not wait for. Then rebuild the pages that answer real buying questions so each leads with its answer rather than arriving at one. Then reconcile the off-site footprint so the web agrees about who you are and what you do.
Only after those three is content volume worth funding. Publishing into a site with an unresolved technical floor and an inconsistent footprint is the most reliable way to spend a year producing work that never compounds.