An AI does not "read" your site the way you do. It does not appreciate your design or your tone. It scans the code, looks for signals it recognises and builds an idea of who you are from them. If your site makes that easy, you have far better odds of being understood and cited. If you make it hard, it ignores you. The good news: almost all of this is orderly technical work, not creative talent.
Structured data: speak its language
Schema.org is a vocabulary that tells the machine, without ambiguity, what each thing on your page is. For a small business, the highest-yield types are clear: Organization (who you are), LocalBusiness (your physical business, with hours and area), Product (your products with price and availability), FAQPage (your frequently asked questions) and BreadcrumbList (the breadcrumbs that show the site's structure). They are implemented in JSON-LD, a block of code that does not change what the user sees but does change what the machine understands.
An honest heads-up on FAQ: since 2026 Google no longer generates the rich result for FAQPage in its search, so do not add it expecting those expandable stars. But marked-up FAQ content still helps the AI understand your page and extract answers from it. The markup now has a different value, not a null one.
Entities and NAP: do not contradict yourself
The AI treats you as an entity: a business with a specific name, address and phone. If your site says "Calle Mayor 3", your Google profile says "C/ Mayor, 3" and a directory says "Mayor 3, ground floor", you are handing it three versions and sowing doubt. NAP consistency (identical name, address, phone everywhere) is one of the most boring and most profitable things you can do. Write it the same, always, on your site, your Google Business Profile and any directory.
E-E-A-T: prove there is someone behind it
The initials E-E-A-T sum up what AI and Google value in order to trust you: experience (you have actually done this), expertise (you know the subject), authoritativeness (others recognise you) and trustworthiness (you are who you say you are). In practice: sign your content with people or with your team, show real cases, link to sources, put up a serious "about us" page, visible contact details and customer reviews. It is not posturing; these are the clues the machine uses to decide whether to cite you.
Clear passages: make extraction easy
The AI does not cite convoluted three-hundred-word paragraphs. It cites short, self-contained passages that answer a specific question. Structure your content with headings that are questions or clear topics, direct answers in the first sentences, and sentences that stand on their own without needing the previous paragraph. That format is what the machine can cut and paste into its answer.
Freshness and speed: two overlooked details
Freshness matters, especially for assistants like Perplexity that reward recency. Update your key content, show visible dates and do not leave four-year-old articles looking like they are from today. And mind the rendering: if your important content only appears after JavaScript runs, many AI crawlers will not see it, because they do not run JS the way your browser does. The text you want cited must sit in the initial HTML, not be assembled in the user's browser.
The summary for your developer
None of this asks you to reinvent your site. It asks for well-placed schema, identical NAP everywhere, real E-E-A-T signals, content sliced into clear passages, honest dates and important text travelling in the HTML. It is a concrete, checkable list. At Social Digital we apply it as part of the technical work, without charging you for smoke.