What makes a passage quotable?
A quotable passage answers one question completely, in its own words, without depending on the sentence before it. That is the whole specification. Everything below is a technique for hitting it consistently across a page rather than by accident once.
Models assemble answers from fragments. They are not reading your page as a narrative arc; they are looking for the smallest chunk of text that resolves the user’s question. Writing that anticipates fragmentation gets picked. Writing that requires the whole essay does not.
Lead with the answer, then justify it
Put the direct answer in the first sentence under each heading, then spend the rest of the paragraph earning it. This inverts how most marketing pages are written — build-up, context, reveal — and it is the single highest-leverage change most sites can make.
The build-up structure isn’t wrong for humans, incidentally. Readers who are scanning also want the answer first. The AI-friendly format and the skim-friendly format turn out to be the same format, which is why this rarely requires a trade-off.
Make headings the questions people ask
Question-shaped headings do two jobs: they give the model an explicit match between a user’s prompt and a section of your page, and they force you to write a section that actually answers something. A heading like “Our Approach” makes no promise. “How long does a migration take?” makes a specific one.
If a heading doesn’t contain a question a real buyer asks, it isn’t working for you.
Give facts a stable shape
Numbers, timeframes, prices, and eligibility rules should appear in a consistent, unambiguous format, close to the claim they support. “Most projects run six to ten weeks” is liftable. “Timelines vary depending on scope, though we move quickly” is not, and no amount of schema markup will rescue it.
Vagueness in your copy is usually a decision you haven’t made yet. Models expose that ruthlessly, because they cannot cite a hedge. If you can’t state the fact plainly, the page will not be used to answer the question the fact belongs to.
Keep one idea per block
Long paragraphs that cover three points get cited for none of them, because no clean fragment exists. Split at the point where the subject changes. The unit of retrieval is roughly a paragraph, so the unit of composition should be too.
Then check your work mechanically
Read the page as a list of isolated paragraphs, out of order. Any paragraph that becomes meaningless is one that will never be quoted. Any paragraph that still stands is a candidate citation, and pages made mostly of candidates are the pages that show up inside answers.
Do this before you invest in markup or authority work. Structure is the cheapest of the three levers and the one that fails most visibly when skipped.