Nearly half of ChatGPT quotes come from a page's top
Where you put your best sentence looks like it changes whether a chatbot quotes it.
When ChatGPT quotes a web page, it usually quotes the beginning of it.
That is the headline finding from a study of 3 million ChatGPT answers and 30 million citations, run by Kevin Indig and written up by Alex Groberman on X. Of the passages ChatGPT pulled, 44.2% came from the first third of the content. 31.1% came from the middle. Only 24.7% came from the final third.
The traits shared by quoted text
The study also looked at what the quoted passages sounded like. Cited text was packed with proper nouns, meaning names of companies, products, people, technologies and places. Normal writing runs about 5% to 8% proper nouns. Highly cited text was around 20.6%.
Plain, definitive sentences did well too, the sort that start with "X is" or "X refers to". Cited content was roughly twice as likely to contain a question mark, and 78.4% of citations tied to questions came from headings. Groberman's read is that a heading works like a question and the paragraph underneath it works like the answer. The best performing content also leaned neutral and analytical rather than salesy.
What this means for your site
This is one study of one chatbot, not a rule Google or OpenAI has published. Nobody has confirmed the mechanism. But the pattern points the same way as plain good writing advice. If somebody lands on your page asking "what does a chimney sweep cost in Leeds", answer it in the first paragraph rather than after 400 words of throat clearing.
So the practical move is small. Take your three or four most important pages, the service pages and the posts that actually bring in enquiries, and read the first 150 words of each. If the main fact, price, definition or answer is not in there, move it up. Name the specific things you do and the specific places you serve instead of writing "industry leading solutions".
Then turn your section headings into the questions your customers ask out loud, and put a direct answer in the sentence right below each one.
None of this asks you to write worse. It asks you to stop burying the point. A page that answers the question early tends to do better with human readers on a phone too, which is the more reliable reason to bother.
If your pages already open with the answer, do nothing.
44.2% of ChatGPT citations came from the first third of the content.
Typical text contained roughly 5% to 8% proper nouns. Highly cited text was around 20.6%.