Citation share, the percentage of answers in a query cluster that link to or name your domain, is the closest thing generative engines have to a ranking number. We’ve tested a dozen interventions against it. These are the three that work.
1. Write the summary the engine will steal
Most pages bury the conclusion. The retrieval layer grabs the first clean paragraph that looks like a direct answer. Put that paragraph at the top, one self-contained sentence, then the nuance.
2. Get cited by the sources the model already trusts
Generative engines lean on a concentrated set of authoritative domains. A mention in one of those sources propagates into model outputs faster than any amount of on-page change. Treat digital PR as a measurement problem: track which domains the engines over-cite for your queries, and pitch there.
3. Publish the structured data the engine expects
Schema markup still matters, but the schema that matters is the one the model was trained to expect. Product, FAQ, HowTo, and Article schemas correlate with citation presence. Arbitrary custom schemas don’t.
Two interventions that don’t move the number
- Keyword density. Generative models don’t care how many times you say the term.
- Generic link building. Low-trust backlinks add nothing; they may actively dilute the signal on sites that keep a citation allowlist.
