Most AEO/GEO advice hands you a checklist: add structured data, write answer-first, put a date on it, get a score. You do all of it, and the AI answer still quotes someone else. The checklist skipped the only question that decides the outcome first: for this particular query, can an independent site get cited at all?
Getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews is a two-stage funnel, and the stages fail for completely different reasons. Grade your page without knowing which stage you're stuck at and you'll spend a day tuning headings on a page that was never eligible.
Here's the model, and how to run the check yourself before you touch the formatting.
Stage 1: eligibility — can the engine retrieve you at all?
Answer engines are retrieval-augmented. Before anything gets generated, a retriever picks a small set of candidate pages. If you're not in that set, nothing about your writing matters. Three things decide it, and only some are visible in your HTML.
