Make your website a source that AI engines cite and recognize
Description
This criterion checks that your domain is recognized as a source: your website is cited in at least 5% of the answers collected for your brand over 30 days, by at least two engines; a Wikipedia article, in the market’s language or in English, links to your domain; the domain appears in the latest Common Crawl index.
Citations are only computed from 10 answers onwards. iPand does not count backlinks and uses no third-party authority score.
Why it matters for AI engines
Being cited by an AI engine means being the source of its answer: the link to your website is shown next to the text. A website cited by a single engine is not seen by users of the others. Wikipedia and Common Crawl, two open and freely reusable corpora, show whether your domain is known beyond your own website.
- The share of answers that cite your website directly measures your role as a source for the questions you track.
- A link from a Wikipedia article shows that independent editors consider your website a useful reference.
- Common Crawl publishes an open web corpus used to train many language models: a domain missing from it is not part of that data.
How to fix it
- 1 Answer the tracked questions precisely Find the tracked questions where AI engines cite websites other than yours, and publish pages that answer them directly: the answer first, then verifiable facts such as your prices, terms or locations. Bing states that accurate, well-structured content improves citation accuracy.
- 2 Let every engine read your pages An AI engine can only cite what its crawler or search engine can read. Check the Google indexing, Bing indexing and robots.txt and AI crawlers criteria in iPand: a blocked engine cannot use your pages, even if the others do.
- 3 Earn a legitimate reference on Wikipedia If a Wikipedia article covers your sector or your town and your website provides a useful source, propose it on the article’s talk page and disclose your connection with the brand. Wikipedia strongly discourages editing articles about yourself and does not accept self-promotion.
- 4 Open your website to Common Crawl If you want to be part of this corpus, check that robots.txt does not block CCBot, Common Crawl’s crawler, and list your sitemap in it, which the crawler uses to explore the website. Common Crawl only archives a sample of the web: a domain can be missing without being blocked.
Key takeaway
A recognized domain is first of all a domain that AI engines cite: publish the answers your customers look for, let every engine read you and earn independent references. iPand only counts the answers collected for your brand.
