Get Cited by AI: How to Improve Your Citation Velocity

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, getting your content cited by AI models is becoming increasingly important.

As AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini gain prominence, understanding how to optimize your content for AI citations can significantly enhance your visibility and authority. This guide will walk you through the strategies to increase your citation velocity and ensure your content is recognized by AI models.

What is a crawl budget?

Just like a traditional crawl budget, an AI crawl budget refers to the amount of resources AI models allocate to crawl and index your content. Similar to traditional search engines, AI models prioritize content based on how relevant it is to a user’s query and its domain and topical authority, making it crucial to optimize your content for AI visibility.

Crawl budget refers to how many resources a search engine allocates to crawling and indexing a particular site in a particular time frame. Let's use Google as an example. When Google crawls or recrawls a site, it has a certain crawl budget that speaks to how much of the site it’s going to ingest as it comes back.

So, when people optimize for crawl budget and say that they have a ton of low-quality pages, they will start to sculpt their site to block many of those pages [from being crawled] because there’s only so much budget that Google and other search engines are going to allot.

Why is crawl budget important?

Understanding crawl budget is essential because it determines how often and correctly search engines and AI models will index your content. A well-optimized crawl budget ensures that your content is optimized to be cited, increasing your chances of being recognized as a credible source.

“Google or any search engineSearch Engine
A search engine is a website through which users can search internet content.
Learn more or AI bots are only going to spend a certain amount of time on your site.

They have an infinite number of sites that they're crawling and trying to find content from, so they're not going to spend their entire time on your site; they have a specific amount of time that depends on the site.

If you're a larger, more authoritative site, like a news site, they might spend a little bit more time on relevant types of articles. Since they're only on there for a short amount of time, you want to make sure that they're able to find your best, most valuable content quickly.” - Mary Palumbo

What is the difference between AI crawling and search engine crawling?

AI crawling and traditional search engine crawling are similar on their surfaces, but their core approaches and objectives are distinct.

• Traditional search engines like Google use web crawlers, sometimes called bots or spiders, to scan and index billions of sites across the internet. Their goal is to create a searchable index that can quickly return relevant web pages in response to user queries based on things like keyword density, backlink profiles, and site structure to evaluate and rank content.
• AI crawling, used by Large Language Models (LLMs) and answer engines, involves semantic analysis and contextual understanding. Instead of indexing keywords and metadata, AI models are engineered to extract meaning, detect reliable sources, and synthesize content across multiple domains to generate contextually accurate answers. That means the data models that power AI search surfaces prioritize comprehensive information and authority over raw link volume. Even newly published content with high-quality, well-labeled data and schema markup can be surfaced and cited by AI models more quickly if it’s relevant to trending discussions or answers users' questions.

Take our own content at Conductor as an example. One of our pages, a comparison page between our product and Profound. Published on July 25, we noticed that by July 30, the page had been visited by Perplexity over 60 times, ChatGPT over 150 times, and Google only 18 times. That put the page in the top 10% and top 8% of visited pages for ChatGPT and Perplexity, respectively.

The reasons why LLMs seem to be crawling sites more frequently than search engine bots vary, but it speaks to the importance of keeping your content fresh, as you never know when your site might be crawled by LLMs.

An important consideration is that when using ChatGPT, if the user doesn't click the search icon, it may not trigger a search. In those cases, it will not pick up updated information if it's not in the foundational data set the model was trained on.

Do ChatGPT and Perplexity have a crawl budget internally? 100%. But how often an LLM, like ChatGPT, crawls your site depends on the user queries. It depends on what users are looking for. They crawl whatever information the users need access to.

What is citation velocity?

Citation velocity refers to how quickly AI models and other platforms cite your content within their output. It reflects the speed at which your content is recognized and establishes authority in the digital ecosystem.

Why is citation velocity important?

Citation velocity is a critical metric for businesses in the new AI age. High citation velocity indicates that your content is gaining traction and being recognized as a valuable resource. That helps establish your authority going forward and helps get your content in front of your desired audience faster. This can lead to increased visibility, improved expertise, and greater influence in your industry.

Can answer engines crawl content faster than traditional search engines?

Yes, answer engines crawl new content or website updates faster than traditional search engines, and they tend to revisit and re-crawl them more frequently than traditional bots. AI models like ChatGPT use advanced algorithms to quickly identify and reference relevant content, making it essential to optimize your content for these platforms.

Conductor case study: Immediate answer engine crawling of new content

Take a recent piece of content we published as an example. We published the content, A Guide to Enterprise AEO & SEO Centers of Excellence, on September 2. ChatGPT and Perplexity had crawled the page 5 and 3 times respectively, the same day it was published, while Bing and Google wouldn’t crawl it for the first time until 1-2 days later. By then, ChatGPT and Perplexity had each visited the page several more times.

This example shows that answer engines, in some cases, crawl new, well-structured content almost immediately after publishing, while traditional search engines can take multiple days to do the same (if not longer).

How quickly can my content get cited by AI?

How quickly your content gets cited by AI models varies based on multiple factors, including the efficiency of the website's technical infrastructure, the authority and relevance of the domain, and how closely the content aligns with real-time search trends.

In most cases, high-authority websites with a strong backlink profile, well-structured metadata, rich Schema markup, and a strong technical foundation have their updates indexed by AI-driven answer engines faster, sometimes even within a matter of hours or days.

For smaller or lower-authority domains, it may take longer for AI models to detect, crawl, and cite newly published information, especially if the content doesn’t have backlinksBacklinks
Backlinks are links from outside domains that point to pages on your domain; essentially linking back from their domain to yours.
Learn more, external validation, or clear topical signals.

How can you measure your citation velocity?

Measuring citation velocity involves tracking how often and how quickly your content is cited by AI models and other platforms. This metric offers insight into how influential and relevant your content is. Conductor Monitoring is the only platform on the market that provides real-time monitoring for both LLMs and traditional bot crawlersCrawlers
A crawler is a program used by search engines to collect data from the internet.
Learn more. Even if an LLM crawled your site a minute ago, Conductor Monitoring will report that crawl immediately.

This breaks down into two key workflows, one that shows you how often your content is being crawled by LLMs, so that you can identify any technical issues or blockers keeping bots from crawling them. The other workflow helps you track how that crawlability leads to mentions and citations within AI output.

To measure how often your pages are crawled by LLMs in Conductor, follow these steps:

1. Log in to Conductor Monitoring
2. Navigate to the Pages tab
3. Click on Manage Columns in the top left of the page
4. Filter the results by Search Engine Activity
5. Select the Visit Frequency and Last Visited options for ChatGPT and Perplexity
6. Apply the new columns and view the results

This helps you pinpoint which pages represent opportunities to optimize as well as which pages are performing well, so you can leverage those learnings on future content. You can even compare the crawl frequency and visits of answer engines against search engines like Google and Bing, and save that view on your dashboard to get a quick, clear view of how frequently answer engines are crawling your content.

Once you’ve narrowed down a page or group of pages you want to research further, you can start diving into how that content is actually performing in terms of mentions and citations in AI.

For example, say that you run an eCommerce website and you’re looking to optimize a group of similar product pages for a new line of running shoes.

1. Log in to Conductor Intelligence
2. Navigate to the Performance tab
3. Click on AI Search
4. Create a New Topic
5. Return to the AI Search overview page
6. Filter by your desired topic

By following these steps in Conductor, you can efficiently monitor and interpret citation velocity on any given topic, empowering you to refine your content strategy for greater visibility and influence.

What factors impact your citation velocity?

Just like your crawlability and crawl budget in traditional search, a lot goes into your citation velocity. Below are a few of the factors to consider when trying to accelerate how quickly your content is cited by AI.

• Content quality: High-quality, well-researched content significantly increases the likelihood of being cited by search engines and AI models because it offers clear value to users. Thorough research, up-to-date facts, and original analysis demonstrate expertise and make your content stand out among competitors.
• Content relevance: Ensuring that your content is closely aligned with trending topics and common user search queries is essential. By regularly updating your content to reflect changes in your industry and incorporating relevant keywords, you improve the chances of your pages being surfaced and cited more frequently.
• Authority: Build your website’s credibility through quality backlinks and strong reputation signals to AI models that your content can be trusted. When other reputable sites link to your pages, it reinforces your site’s standing as a go-to resource within your domain. That heightened authority increases the speed at which your content is identified, referenced, and recommended by search algorithms.
• Structured data: Implementing structured data and schema markup helps search engines and AI models better understand the context and organization of your content. By providing this extra layer of information, you enhance your material’s discoverability, making it easier for search platforms to accurately categorize and highlight your pages in relevant results. This improved visibility can lead to more frequent citations and greater traffic.

If your site's not accessible, or your site has any accessibility issues for AI bots, that could have a major impact on how often you're cited. Another key piece of this is just having the answer to the user’s question. Does your site have content that actually answers the question?

How can I improve my citation velocity?

Improving your citation velocity requires a robust strategy designed to improve your brand’s authority and visibility. Here’s how you can approach this, with practical examples for each step:

• Enhance content quality: Start by developing comprehensive, evidence-based resources that deliver meaningful insights to your audience. For instance, instead of publishing a general overview, you could create a detailed case study or data-driven analysis with original graphics and references. Incorporating expert interviews, embedding multimedia, and highlighting actionable takeaways will further increase the value of your content, making it more likely to attract citations from others seeking authoritative material.
• Optimize for AI models: To ensure your content is easily discoverable by AI models, structure your pages using clear headings, bullet points, and well-organized information. Implementing schema markup and adding structured data, like author profiles, publication dates, and topic tags, enables search engines and AI crawlers to better understand and feature your work. For example, an FAQ section formatted with proper schema can lead to your content being cited in search results and AI-generated summaries in the same easily digestible FAQ format.
• Build authority: Elevate your profile within your industry by securing links from trusted resources and engaging in partnerships with well-regarded organizations. This might involve contributing guest posts to leading publications, collaborating on joint research projects, or participating as a panelist at reputable webinars. Each partnership builds your reputation and prompts others to cite your expertise, whether through references within their own content or by linking back to your resources.
• Stay relevant: Keep your content fresh by routinely updating key sections to include recent trends, data, and insights based on evolving user interests. For example, you might review top-performing articles each quarter to add new research findings, update statistics, or address emerging industry challenges. Staying on top of these updates ensures ongoing engagement and increases the likelihood that others will cite your content as a reliable and up-to-date resource.

Citation velocity in review

Boosting your citation velocity is crucial for increasing your content's visibility and authority in AI search. By understanding AI crawl budgets, optimizing your content for AI models, and focusing on quality and relevance, you can enhance your chances of being cited by AI platforms.

FAQs

• What is AI search?
• What is an answer engine?
• What is AI visibility?
• How to increase mentions and citations?