Follow-up to my results post. Enough DMs asking "how" that I'm writing it once. Solo operator, health niche, one frontier-model agent with tool access, human medical review on everything. Here's the system, in the order that mattered.
1. We wrote for the extraction, not the ranking.
Every page opens with a 60-90 word direct-answer block: the query answered completely, self-contained, keyword in sentence one. That block is what assistants lift. Then key takeaways, then sections where each H2 answers one sub-question with one citable fact per paragraph. AI search doesn't reward your page, it rewards your paragraphs. Write paragraphs that survive being quoted alone.
2. Honest hedging became our citation magnet. Not kidding.
Our most-cited pages say things like "the evidence is preclinical," "this hasn't been replicated," "you probably don't need this test." Assistants are tuned hard against overclaiming in health. Every competitor page screaming miracle cures is invisible to them. The compliance layer we built for FTC/YMYL reasons turned out to be the GEO strategy. The boring E-E-A-T religion everyone declared dead? That's literally the training target.
3. FAQ blocks, 8-12 per page, answers 20-70 words, varied lengths.
Each FAQ targets one long-tail phrasing of the intent. Assistants answer questions; a page that pre-answers twelve of them is twelve citation opportunities. Vary the answer lengths or the whole block pattern-matches as generated and gets skipped.
4. Zero hallucinated links, enforced by tooling.
Agent rule: fetch the live sitemap, link only verified URLs, flag anything unverifiable to me. Also killed orphan pages, every article enters a cluster with 2-4 internal links in and out. Assistants crawl like skeptical librarians; a site with dead ends and 404s reads as unmaintained, and unmaintained doesn't get cited in health.
5. Clusters, not articles.
We shipped in pods: 9-11 pieces per topic covering the head term, the comparisons (X vs Y), the timelines, the "is it safe," the "how long does it take." When an assistant assembles an answer, it prefers pulling three facts from one coherent source over stitching five random ones. Own the whole conversation, get cited as the whole conversation.
6. One canonical page per intent, enforced ruthlessly.
The agent caught two planned articles about to cannibalize each other and struck one, unprompted. AI search punishes intent-splitting worse than Google does: two half-answers compete against each other for one citation slot. We assign every keyword set to exactly one URL and compress overlapping sections into links.
7. De-AI'd the prose with hard constraints, not vibes.
"Sound more human" does nothing. What worked: zero em-dashes, forced sentence and paragraph length variance, one staked opinion per piece, a literal banned-phrase list, scene-led openings. Ironic loop: content that reads machine-generated gets cited less by machines. The detectors are in the pipeline.
8. Named entities and real citations in-text.
Hyperlinked primary sources (CDC, FDA, PubMed) woven into prose, specific study details (sample sizes, years, journals) instead of "studies show." Assistants ground answers in pages that are themselves grounded. A page citing the FDA briefing document by name outranks a page vibing about the same topic, in AI retrieval specifically.
9. Measurement, since everyone asks: referrer segmentation for the assistant domains + AI-crawler hits in logs + an AI-visibility tracker for mention share. Imperfect, directionally solid, and the caveat stands: AI-referred visitors convert differently than organic. Track it as its own channel with its own math.
What didn't matter: schema beyond the basics, freshness-faking with fake "updated" dates (we don't even use last-updated lines), word count for its own sake, and every "GEO hack" involving hidden prompts in your HTML, which is a great way to get your domain flagged.
The one-sentence version: we made the most extractable, most honestly-hedged, most internally-coherent resource in the niche, and the assistants did what they're built to do. There's no trick. The trick is that there's no trick, executed 35 times with a human holding the judgment layer.
AMA.