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The AI Snippet Test: How to Format Answers for Citations

Feb 19, 2026

Full Transcript

Be the Answer - Emarketed's AEO Show

Episode: The AI Snippet Test: How to Format Answers for Citations

Host: Alex Format: Solo Length: ~10 minutes

5 Title Options

  1. The AI Snippet Test: How to Format Answers for Citations
  2. Can AI Actually Quote Your Content? The 40–90 Word Snippet Test
  3. 5 Formatting Rules That Get Your Content Cited by AI
  4. The Snippet Test: A 30-Second Audit for AI Visibility
  5. Stop Writing for Humans Only: Format Your Content for AI Citations

Episode Description

AI assistants are answering millions of questions daily - but is your content getting cited? In this episode of Be the Answer, Alex breaks down the AI Snippet Test, a dead-simple framework to check whether your content is formatted for extraction by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. You'll learn the ideal snippet length, five formatting rules, and get a step-by-step checklist you can implement this week.

Whether you're a founder optimizing your own site or a marketer managing content at scale, this episode gives you the tactical playbook for earning AI citations - starting today.

Key Takeaways:

  • The AI Snippet Test: Can AI lift a clean 40–90 word answer from your page?
  • Five formatting rules: answer-first structure, question headers, lists, tables, short paragraphs
  • Two concrete examples showing good vs. bad snippet formatting
  • A five-step checklist to optimize your top pages this week
  • Free tools: Emarketed's AI Visibility Score and llms.txt generator at emarketed.com

Full Transcript

[HOOK]

You know what's wild? Right now, AI is answering millions of questions every day - and it's pulling those answers from someone's content. The question is: is it pulling from yours?

Here's the truth most marketers are missing. It doesn't matter how great your content is if AI can't extract a clean answer from it. If your page is a wall of text, if your answers are buried in paragraph seven, you are invisible to AI.

Today, I'm going to give you something I call the AI Snippet Test - a dead-simple framework to check whether your content is formatted for AI citations. Stick around - this one's going to change how you write everything.

[INTRO]

Welcome back to Be the Answer - Emarketed's AEO show. I'm Alex, and this is where we break down what it actually takes to get your brand cited by AI. Let's get into it.

[THE SNIPPET TEST]

So what is the AI Snippet Test? It's a self-audit you can run on any page of your website in about 30 seconds. Here's the idea. AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews don't read your content the way a human does. They scan it. They look for structured, self-contained blocks of text that directly answer a question. If they find one, they extract it, cite it, and move on. If they don't? They go to the next source.

The snippet test is simple. Take any section of your page and ask yourself: Can AI lift this block - just this block - and use it as a complete answer to a question? If yes, you pass. If no, you've got work to do.

And here's the magic number range: 40 to 90 words. That's the sweet spot for an extractable answer. Long enough to be complete and useful. Short enough that AI doesn't have to trim or paraphrase it. Think of it as a self-contained paragraph that could stand alone as a definition, an explanation, or a recommendation.

Research shows that AI models heavily favor these bite-sized, structured answers. Snippets in that 40-to-90-word range appear significantly more often in AI citations than longer paragraphs. So the first thing I want you to do after this episode is pick your most important landing page and run the snippet test. Can AI extract a clean, 40-to-90-word answer from it? If not - we're going to fix that right now.

[FORMATTING RULES]

Let's talk about the formatting rules that make your content AI-friendly. There are five rules I live by.

Rule number one: Lead with the answer. Every section of your content should start with a direct, one-sentence answer. Not a story. Not context. The answer. Then follow it with two to four sentences of supporting detail. This is what I call the answer-first pattern, and it's the single most important thing you can do for AEO. AI models scan the first 150 words of a section. If your answer isn't there, it doesn't exist to them.

Rule number two: Use question-based headers. Your H2s and H3s should read like the questions your audience is actually asking. Instead of a header that says "Our Process," write "How does answer engine optimization work?" This aligns your content with the way people prompt AI - and the way AI parses structure.

Rule number three: Use bullets and numbered lists. AI loves lists. Bullet points for features, benefits, and comparisons. Numbered lists for steps and processes. Keep them flat - no nested sub-bullets - and aim for three to seven items per list. Lists are three times more likely to get cited than plain paragraphs.

Rule number four: Add tables where they make sense. If you're comparing products, plans, features, or data points - use a table. AI models can parse tables cleanly and often reproduce them in their answers. A comparison table is one of the highest-performing formats for AI citations.

Rule number five: Keep paragraphs short. Three to five sentences max. Each paragraph should contain one idea. If you're going longer than that, break it up. AI doesn't do well with dense, multi-idea paragraphs.

If you follow these five rules, you're already ahead of 90 percent of the content on the web.

[EXAMPLES]

Let me give you two quick examples to make this concrete.

Example one. Let's say you're a SaaS company and someone asks, "What is customer onboarding software?" A bad answer buries the definition three paragraphs deep after a story about why onboarding matters. A good answer starts with: "Customer onboarding software is a platform that automates and streamlines the process of guiding new users through product setup, training, and adoption. Key features typically include step-by-step workflows, progress tracking, in-app guidance, and automated email sequences." That's 40 words, it's complete, and AI can lift it as-is. That's a pass on the snippet test.

Example two. You're a digital marketing agency, and the query is "What is answer engine optimization?" Here's your snippet: "Answer engine optimization, or AEO, is the practice of structuring website content so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can easily find, extract, and cite it when answering user questions. It focuses on formatting, authority signals, and direct answer placement." That's 45 words. Clean. Complete. Citable. Both of these examples follow the same pattern - direct answer first, supporting detail second, all within that 40-to-90-word sweet spot.

[ACTION STEPS + CHECKLIST]

Alright, let's make this actionable. Here's your quick checklist - five things to do this week.

  1. Pick your top five pages - the ones that matter most for your business. Run the snippet test on each one. Can AI extract a clean 40-to-90-word answer?
  2. Rewrite your headers. Turn every H2 into a question your audience would actually ask an AI assistant.
  3. Restructure your paragraphs. Lead every section with a direct answer. No throat-clearing. Answer first, context second.
  4. Add at least one list or table to each of those pages. Lists for features and steps, tables for comparisons.
  5. Check your paragraph length. If anything is longer than five sentences, break it up.

That's it. Five steps. You can knock this out in an afternoon, and I promise you'll see the difference in how AI handles your content.

[CTA]

And hey - if you want to know exactly where your brand stands with AI right now, head over to emarketed.com and check out the AI Visibility Score. It'll show you how AI models are currently seeing and citing your brand. And while you're there, try the llms.txt generator - it creates a machine-readable file that tells AI crawlers exactly what your site is about. Both are free. Go check them out.

[SIGN-OFF]

That's it for today's episode of Be the Answer. I'm Alex. If this was useful, share it with a marketer who's still writing for humans only. And I'll see you in the next one. Peace.