Had a 10x in AI citations in 3 weeks. I have created a free .md file that may help others too

Following up on the SEO writeup I posted here a while back. This time the metric I cared about was different: how often my content site actually gets cited inside AI answers (ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity, the Google AI overviews), rather than where it ranks.

Starting point was around 18 citations. About two weeks later it sat at 163.

Three things did most of the lifting:

• The real answer in the first 100 words of the page, structured so a machine can lift it cleanly.
• The "best [category] for [audience]" listicle and comparison format, done with actual per-entry judgement. Assistants reach for that shape constantly.
• A genuinely machine-readable site: valid structured data, a clean markdown layer for crawlers, and an explicit AI crawler allowlist.

The one that cost me the most time: my CDN was silently blocking a couple of the AI crawlers at the edge. Worth checking yours before anything else, even if you think you have a healthy llm.txt file.

Same as last time, I wrote the full process into a downloadable .md you can paste into your agent and have it apply phase by phase to your own site. Completely free, no paywall. Not linking it here; it is under resources on my site and reachable from my profile.

Ask me anything about the phases below. The crawler thing still bugs me, so happy to get into how I caught it.