Pillar
Getting quoted by AI engines
How a page ends up inside an AI answer. The fetching that makes it possible, why being in a model and being read by one are different things, and the dull name-and-address work that decides whether anything will say your name at all.
Each platform documents its own crawlers and controls, and the spokes cite them. How any engine picks which source to quote is published by none of them, and we say so rather than guess.
No area of this field has a wider gap between how confident people sound and how much they actually know.
There's a lot of advice out there about getting cited by AI. Almost none of it came from the companies running the AI. What they do publish is narrower and far more useful: which crawlers they run, what each one controls, and whether a given engine reads the live web at all. That's the ground we stand on here. Everything past it, we label.
How do you get cited by an AI engine?
Be fetchable, be quotable, and be clear about who you are. Nothing can quote a page it can't retrieve, or lift a sentence it can't separate from the rest, or name a company it isn't sure it has identified right.
Past those three, nobody outside the platforms knows what tips the choice. We teach the three you control and don't invent the rest.
Fix this first
Make your company describe itself identically everywhere. Same name, same address, same phone, same description, same identifiers — on your own sites and on every profile somebody else hosts.
It sounds like housekeeping because it is. It's also the difference between a machine that's sure you're one company and a machine hedging between three that look similar. Sure gets your name into the answer. Hedging doesn't.
We see this constantly. A firm has its name one way on the website, another way on its Google profile, a third way on a directory someone set up in 2019 and forgot. To you those are obviously the same company. To a machine they're three candidates, and the safe move is to name none of them.
How AI engines retrieve
Retrieval is what lets a model quote something you published this morning. Understanding it tells you which levers exist — and which widely repeated tactics are aimed at nothing at all.
What Google documents
Google published a guide to showing up in its AI features, and a big chunk of it is a list of popular tactics it says you don't need. That makes it the most useful source in this field, and the most uncomfortable one.
Training vs retrieval
One of these you can change this afternoon. The other changes when somebody else trains a model. Knowing which is which tells you where effort is worth spending and where it is wasted.
Platform matrix
One row per engine, each with its own last-verified date and a link to the platform's own documentation. Where a row could not be verified, it says so instead of being filled in from memory.
Entity consistency
The highest-value work in getting quoted by AI is also the dullest. Describe your company the same way everywhere, give it one stable identifier, and stop handing machines reasons to hedge about who you are.
Comparative content
Comparison questions are among the most valuable a buyer asks and among the most common an AI engine is given. The format decides whether you can be quoted — a table in HTML can be, the same table as an image cannot.