Playbook · AI search
Answer capsules: pages an AI can cite
AI products answer a question by pulling passages from a few pages and naming where they came from. A passage gets pulled when it answers the question outright and makes sense without the paragraphs around it.
An answer capsule is that passage, written on purpose: the question as a heading, and directly under it a short, complete, specific answer. Everything else on the page supports it.
The steps
6 steps- 1Fix the question set
- 2Record who is cited today
- 3Put the question in the heading
- 4Answer in the first two or three sentences
- 5Make the claims specific and sourced
- 6Make sure the page can be read
Use this when
- A page ranks on Google and is never named in AI answers for the same question.
- Your pages open with background before reaching the point.
- You are writing a new page and want it to be citable from the first draft.
The steps
6 steps, in order
How to restructure a page so the answer comes first, in a passage that can be lifted and quoted on its own.
- 1
Fix the question set
Write down the questions a buyer would put to an assistant about your category: what it is, what it costs, which product suits which case, how to do the main job. Twenty is enough to start. These are the questions you will check every month.
- 2
Record who is cited today
Ask each question in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google, and note which sources are named. This is your baseline. Without it you cannot tell whether later changes did anything.
- 3
Put the question in the heading
Use the question, or a close statement of it, as an H2. “How much does payroll software cost?” matches what is asked. “Pricing considerations” does not.
- 4
Answer in the first two or three sentences
Directly under the heading, give the answer in roughly 40 to 60 words. Name the subject in full instead of writing “it” or “this”, so the passage still makes sense when it is quoted alone.
Then go into detail. The capsule is the summary; the rest of the section is the evidence.
- Starts with the answer, not with context
- Names the subject explicitly
- Contains a specific fact, number or condition
- Reads correctly with nothing before or after it
- 5
Make the claims specific and sourced
Replace “affordable” with the price, “fast” with the time, “many integrations” with the number. Where a figure is not yours, name the source and the date. A claim that can be checked is a claim that can be cited.
- 6
Make sure the page can be read
Confirm AI crawlers are not blocked in robots.txt, that the answer is in the page's HTML and not loaded afterwards by a script, and that the page has FAQ or article structured data where it applies.
What goes wrong
The mistakes to avoid
A capsule with nothing in it
“The cost varies depending on your needs” is first, short and useless. If the honest answer is a range, give the range and what moves it.
Writing for the machine only
Capsules also serve the person who lands on the page and wants the answer quickly. If it reads oddly to a human, rewrite it.
Expecting a guarantee
Nobody controls what an AI system says. This raises the odds that your page is one of the sources. It does not fix them.
How to tell it worked
Re-ask the same question set monthly and count the answers that name you.
Referral visits from AI products in your analytics.
For Google's AI Overviews, whether you are linked on the tracked searches that show one.
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