AI answer engines — Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Gemini — increasingly answer users without a click. For developers, that shifts the goal: it's no longer only "rank the page," it's "be the source the model quotes." The good news is that a lot of what makes a site citable is squarely front-end and infra work. Here's the checklist my team actually uses.
1. Server-render anything you want cited
LLM crawlers are far better at parsing HTML that exists before JavaScript runs. If your key content only appears after client-side hydration, assume it won't be reliably read.
Prefer SSR or static generation (Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, etc.) for content pages.
Verify what the bot actually sees:
