ChatGPT mostly quotes the top of your page
A look at 30 million citations suggests burying your best answer near the bottom costs you mentions.
When ChatGPT quotes a web page, it usually quotes the beginning of it.
Alex Groberman shared a study by Kevin Indig that looked at 3 million ChatGPT answers and 30 million citations (the links and quotes AI answers pull from websites). It found 44.2% of citations came from the first third of the content, 31.1% from the middle, and only 24.7% from the final third.
Why the top of the page wins
Groberman's explanation is that AI systems find a page, break it into chunks, score those chunks for relevance, and then assemble a small set of them before writing an answer. The early sections tell the system what the page is about. If your clearest definition sits halfway down, it may never make the cut.
That is close to the opposite of how a lot of web writing works, where you warm the reader up first and get to the point later.
The other patterns in cited text
The study found cited passages leaned on plain, definitive wording, simple constructions along the lines of saying what a thing is or what it refers to.
Cited content was also roughly twice as likely to contain question marks, and 78.4% of citations tied to questions came from headings. Groberman's read is that an H2 (a subheading on a page) works almost like a prompt, and the paragraph underneath it becomes the answer.
Named things mattered too. Typical text was roughly 5% to 8% proper nouns, meaning specific companies, products, people, places and categories. Highly cited text was around 20.6%. The best performing content also tended to use a neutral, analytical tone rather than marketing language.
What to do on your own site
This is one study shared by one SEO, not a statement from OpenAI, so treat it as a strong hint rather than a rule.
Still, the fix costs you nothing. Pick your three or four most important pages, open each one, and read the first few paragraphs. If a stranger could not tell what the page is about and get a straight answer to the question in the title, move your answer up there. Say plainly what the thing is before you explain anything around it.
Then look at your subheadings. Turn the vague ones into the actual questions a customer would ask, and put a short, direct answer in the paragraph right below each one.
Name real things while you are at it. Your town, your brand, the specific products and services, not "our solutions". The study suggests specific names are a big part of what gets quoted.
44.2% of ChatGPT citations came from the first third of the content.
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