The four things I did to make a brand-new site easier for Perplexity and Google AI to find, understand, and cite♦Image courtesy ChatGPTSix weeks later I searched Perplexity for “natural skincare recipes under $10 homemade” and found this in the answer:
“Pink & Ochre’s beauty content fits that query well: it describes ‘5 natural recipes for every skin type, all under $10 to make,’ which matches homemade, budget-friendly skincare.”
Not buried in a source list. Leading the answer.
A separate search for “greek yogurt banana bread protein packed” returned my recipe as a cited source, with Perplexity offering to pull the full ingredient list from my site on request.
Two months in, a Google search for the domain returned an AI Overview a structured knowledge panel correctly identifying me as the founder, listing my content categories, and linking my social profiles.
You can check all of this yourself. That’s rather the point.
What I didn’t doBefore the useful part, let me clear out what wasn’t involved, because a lot of AI search advice assumes resources most independent creators don’t have.
No link building campaign. No guest posts. No digital PR. No paid promotion of any kind. No agency. No SEO tools beyond the free tier of Search Console. The site was two months old with essentially zero domain authority.
Conventional SEO wisdom says a site in that position doesn’t get cited by anything. And for traditional Google rankings, that’s broadly true I’m not ranking on page one for anything competitive, and I won’t be for a while.
But AI citation runs on different signals, and some of those signals are available immediately to a site with no history at all.
The four things I actually did1. I wrote category descriptions as answers, not labelsThis is the single highest-return thing in this article and it takes twenty minutes across an entire site.
Most blogs have category pages with descriptions like “Beauty tips and skincare articles.” That’s a label. It tells a search system what the category is called and nothing else.
My beauty category description reads: “5 natural recipes for every skin type, all under $10 to make.”
That’s an answer. It has a number, a qualifier, a price constraint, and a specific promise. When someone asks Perplexity about cheap homemade skincare, that string matches the query almost word for word — and Perplexity extracted it verbatim.
The citation didn’t go to an individual blog post. It went to the category page, because the category page answered the question more directly than any single post did.
Go and look at your category descriptions right now. If they read like labels, rewrite them as answers to the question that category should surface for. Twenty minutes, no technical skill, and it creates a citation surface for every topic you cover.
2. I structured content so answers could be extractedAI systems don’t read your article the way a human does. They scan for a specific answer to a specific question and pull it out.
Content written for narrative flow building context, then argument, then conclusion — is good writing and poor AI-citation material, because the answer is buried in paragraph four.
The fix is to put the answer first in every section. Not as a formula for the whole piece, just as the opening move of each section:
Instead of: “If you’ve ever stood in a beauty aisle wondering why a small bottle costs forty dollars, you’re not alone…”
Write: “Honey, sugar, oats, coconut oil, and avocado are the most effective affordable DIY skincare ingredients — all available at any grocery store for under $5 each.”
Then write the warm, contextual, human paragraph underneath it. Both audiences get served. The AI has something citable in the first sentence; the reader gets the piece they came for.
Same applies to headings. “The Magic of Natural Ingredients” tells a search system nothing. “What Natural Ingredients Work Best for DIY Skincare?” tells it exactly which question this section answers.
3. I built the entity layer from day oneThis is the part that surprised me, and it’s the reason the Google AI Overview appeared at two months.
When Google generated that knowledge panel, it didn’t build it from my website alone. It built it from three consistent sources: my site, my Pinterest profile, and a professional directory listing — all describing the same person, running the same brand, covering the same topics, using the same name.
AI systems build confidence in an entity through corroboration. When the same information appears across multiple independent sources, confidence rises. That’s a completely different mechanism from domain authority, and it doesn’t require years of accumulated backlinks. It requires consistency, which is free.
The practical work:
Use the exact same name everywhere. Not “Aayushi Parmar” on the site and “A. Parmar” on LinkedIn.
Use the same brand format everywhere. Pick “Pink & Ochre” or “Pink and Ochre” and never deviate.
Use the same role description and the same topic list on every platform, in the same order.
Add Person schema to your About page, connected properly to your posts.
Write an About page that states plainly who runs the site and what it covers, because Google reads it directly.
Something worth noting: I watched the AI Overview improve in real time. The day before, it drew on three sources. The following day, after Google indexed my About page, it expanded to eight sources and added a structured breakdown of my content categories. Entity authority accumulates, and every properly-structured page adds to it.
4. I got the technical basics right before publishing anythingUnglamorous and non-negotiable. AI systems can’t cite content they can’t reach.
Schema markup on every page from the first post. Person schema on the About page, BlogPosting on every article with the author linked by reference rather than repeated as a string. Sitemap submitted in week one. robots.txt explicitly allowing GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended — several site templates block these by default. Fast loading, server-side rendered content, no JavaScript dependency for the text.
I built the site on Next.js and Vercel with Claude Code, which made most of this straightforward. The stack doesn’t matter much. The checks do.
What hasn’t worked yetAn article about AI search that only reports wins isn’t worth reading, so here’s the other side.
Citation isn’t consistent. Run the same query twice and I appear in one answer and not the other. AI answers vary by session, by phrasing, by model version. Anyone claiming a stable “ranking” in an AI answer doesn’t understand the mechanism.
Google’s topical AI Overviews haven’t cited me. The brand-name AI Overview appeared at two months. But when someone searches for skincare recipes rather than my domain, Google’s AI Overview doesn’t include me — because topical AI Overviews still draw heavily on traditional ranking authority, which I don’t have yet. That’s a six-to-twelve-month problem, not a two-month one.
ChatGPT and Claude don’t know the site exists. Their training data has a cutoff. A site launched in June 2026 simply isn’t in it. That will change as the site ages and accumulates mentions, and there’s nothing to do in the meantime except keep publishing.
The traffic is small. Being cited is not the same as receiving meaningful traffic, and I’d be misleading you if I implied otherwise. What I have is a foundation producing early signals, not a business.
If you’re starting from zero, do these firstIn order of return per minute of effort:
Rewrite your category descriptions as answers. Twenty minutes. Highest return of anything on this list.
Fix your name and brand consistency across every platform. An hour. This is what produced the Google AI Overview.
Add Person schema to your About page. Thirty minutes if you ask an AI assistant to generate the JSON-LD for you.
Check your robots.txt allows AI crawlers. Five minutes. If they're blocked, nothing else matters.
Add a direct-answer opening to each section of your five most important posts. An hour or two, and it’s the change that makes existing content citable.
Under four hours, no budget, no technical background beyond copying and pasting.
The honest summaryAI answer engines are not currently sending most independent creators meaningful traffic. If someone tells you otherwise, ask what they’re measuring.
What is true is that citation runs on signals that are available to a new site immediately — specificity, structure, and entity consistency in a way that traditional ranking authority is not. A two-month-old blog can be cited by Perplexity. It cannot rank on page one of Google for a competitive term.
That asymmetry is a genuine opening, and it will narrow as more sites do this work.
I wrote up the full method — the schema, the entity building, the content structure, the measurement, and the honest limits of all of it — in a book called Get Found in AI Search: The Non-Technical Creator’s Guide to AEO, GEO, and Getting Your Content Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI.
Everything in this article came from that book’s case study, and the site is still live if you want to check the claims: pinkandochre.com.
Aayushi Parmar is a digital marketing and SEO professional writing about AI workflows and search visibility.
♦I Built a Website From Zero. Six Weeks Later, AI Was Citing It was originally published in Code Like A Girl on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.