You get cited by becoming the clearest, most credible, and most quotable source an AI can draw on. The largest academic study on the question — the Princeton GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., 2024), tested across roughly 10,000 queries — found that adding relevant statistics, citations to credible sources, and quotations boosted a source’s visibility in AI answers by up to about 40%, and that simply improving the fluency and clarity of the writing helped as well. Beyond the content itself, three things matter: consistent, machine-readable brand facts (structured data), a clear entity/“about“ presence, and off-site corroboration such as reputable mentions and reviews. In short, the same qualities that make a source trustworthy to a human make it citable to a machine.