Last time we talked about being the answer AI repeats: the stranger who says “second left, big blue sign” rather than the one who takes you on a tour of their cousin’s old street.
This time we’re getting a bit more practical, because it turns out it’s not just how you write that matters, it’s what sort of page you’re writing in the first place.
A fair few studies have now pulled apart the pages that ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity and the rest actually cite. The numbers wobble from study to study, as numbers do, but the same handful of page types keep turning up at the top.
1. Listicles
Yep, the humble “Top 10”. The format everyone’s been a bit snooty about for years turns out to be AI’s absolute favourite.
Every study we’ve seen puts listicles at the top of the pile, one analysis from Wix’s AI Search Lab, covering over a million citations, found listicles were the single most-cited page type at around 22%. Another, from Evertune, looked at the most-cited URLs and found roughly half of them were lists.
Why? Because a list does AI’s job for it; lots of options, neatly separated, each one easy to lift out and repeat.
How to use it: give each item a clear heading, then a line or two saying what it is and why it’s on the list. Put the most useful bit first and make it a genuinely useful list, not ten ways of saying the same thing.
2. Step-by-step guides
If someone asks an AI “how do I do X”, it wants a process it can walk them through “Step one, step two, step three”. Guides laid out like that are exactly what it’s after.
How to use it: number your steps, start each one with the action (“Turn off the water”, not “The first thing you’ll want to think about is…”), and keep them in the order people actually do them. If a step needs a caveat, put it after the instruction, not before.
3. FAQ pages
This one’s the purest form of what we banged on about last time; one question, one short answer.
AI tools love a page where the question is right there as a heading and the answer sits directly beneath it.
How to use it: write your headings as the actual questions people ask, in the words they’d use. Then answer in the first sentence or two; detail can follow, but the answer comes first. (You’ll notice we practise what we preach at the bottom of this post.)
4. Alternatives pages
Here’s one a lot of businesses shy away from, pages like “best alternatives to [big competitor]”.
People search for these when they’re close to buying. They’ve looked at the obvious option, something’s not quite right, and they want to know what else is out there. That’s a proper high-intent moment, and AI tools are answering it with whoever’s written the clearest page.
Most brands never write one for their own site, which means someone else is writing it for them, and they get to decide how you’re described.
How to use it: Lay out the options honestly, say who each one suits, and include yourself where you genuinely fit. A page that just slags off the competition reads like an advert, and neither people nor AI trust adverts.
5. Comparison pages
Close cousin of the alternatives page, the good old “X vs Y”.
These match exactly what people type (“WordPress vs Squarespace”, “heat pump vs gas boiler”) and they catch people right at the point of making a decision.
How to use it: find the real “versus” questions in your area first, then structure the page head-to-head; price, features, who it’s best for, a straight verdict. Tables work brilliantly here.
So what’s the takeaway?
None of these are new, they’re formats we’ve all been writing for years. What’s changed is that they’ve gone from “nice to have” to the pages doing the heavy lifting when AI goes looking for an answer.
And they’ve all got one thing in common, they’re structured so that a single chunk can be pulled out and still make sense on its own, a list item.
Which, when you think about it, is just the big blue sign again – clear, separate, easy to repeat.
If you’re not sure where to start, have a look at the questions your customers ask you most, then ask yourself which of these five structures would answer them best. That’s your content plan sorted for the next few months.
