Assistants do not read your page the way a person does. They retrieve chunks of it — a paragraph, a list, a table — and assemble an answer from fragments that may come from several sources at once.
That single mechanical fact explains most of what separates content that gets cited from content that does not. A page can be well written, well researched and completely unusable to a retrieval system.
Answer first, evidence second
The complete answer to the page's core question should appear in the first hundred words, in plain prose, and should make sense if lifted out with nothing around it.
The instinct in most content writing is to build toward the answer. For extraction, invert it: lead with the answer, then spend the rest of the page earning it. Readers benefit from this too — it is only writers who prefer the other order.
Write self-contained passages
Every paragraph should survive being read in isolation. In practice that means avoiding pronouns that reach back several paragraphs, referring to entities by name rather than 'the platform' or 'this approach', and not relying on a heading two screens up to supply the subject.
A useful test: copy any single paragraph into a blank document. If a stranger could not tell what it is about, a retrieval system cannot either.
Give every statistic a source and a date
An unsourced number is a liability. Systems that weight source quality will discount it, and a human checking your claim will find nothing behind it.
Name the source in the sentence, link it, and state when it was published. This is also the single easiest way to be the version of a fact that gets quoted, because most competing pages will not have bothered.
Use structure that carries meaning
Headings, lists and tables are not decoration — they are chunk boundaries.
- Headings should be the question a reader would ask, not a clever label
- Lists should hold genuinely parallel items, not prose broken up for visual relief
- Tables should compare comparable things, with headers that name the dimension
- Definitions should be forty to sixty words and read as a complete standalone statement
Make it machine-readable as well as human-readable
Structured data for the page type, a consistent entity name across your whole site, and a machine-readable summary at a predictable path. None of these are exotic, and most sites do at least one of them inconsistently.
Consistency matters more than completeness here. Three different descriptions of your business across three templates is worse than one plain description used everywhere.
The check that catches most problems
Take the question your page is meant to answer and ask an assistant directly. Read what comes back, then read your page.
If your page does not contain a passage that could plausibly have produced that answer, you have found the gap. It is usually not a knowledge gap — it is a structure gap, and structure is far cheaper to fix than expertise.