An AI assistant answering a question usually takes a single paragraph from a page and shows it without the ones around it, so a paragraph that is meant to be quoted has to make sense on its own. That means naming its subject in full, giving the answer in the first sentence, and being specific enough to be worth lifting. No technique guarantees that any assistant will cite your page, and nobody should promise otherwise. But a page written this way is clearer to people as well, which is the better reason to do it.
Answer first, then explain
Open a section with the direct answer to the question it implies, in one sentence, and give the reasoning afterwards. Writers are trained to build towards a conclusion, which suits an essay and suits an extractor badly. If the answer arrives in the fourth sentence, a system lifting the first two has taken the throat-clearing and left the point.
This is also the shape a busy reader prefers. Whoever skims gets the answer; whoever wants to understand it keeps reading.
Repeat the subject instead of leaning on pronouns
“It also reduces the cost” means nothing once it is separated from the sentence before. “A redirect map also reduces the cost of a migration” still means something. Where a paragraph depends on “this”, “that” or “the above”, restate what is being talked about.
It feels repetitive on the page, and the cost is small. A paragraph that cannot be understood out of context cannot be quoted, however good it is in sequence.
Name things precisely
Specific terms are what a retrieval system matches against a question. “A modern image format” matches nothing; naming the format, or the metric you measure, gives a reader and a machine something definite. The same applies to definitions: when you introduce a concept, say what it is in a sentence that stands alone.
Use numbers only when you have them and can stand behind them. A made-up figure is worse than none, because it is easily repeated.
Give each section one job
A heading is a promise about what follows. Keep it, and keep each section to a single point, so that lifting it leaves nothing dangling. Headings written as statements tell a reader and a system what the section concludes, while vague labels do not.
Lists and short definitions are easy to extract. Use them where the content really is a list or a definition, and not to chop prose into fragments.
What it costs your argument
There is a real trade-off. A line of reasoning that builds across several paragraphs, each leaning on the last, is hard to quote, and rewriting every paragraph to stand alone can flatten it. Not every page should be written this way. A piece meant to persuade over time may be better left as a continuous argument.
Choose per page. Reference material, explanations and answers benefit most from standalone paragraphs; essays and opinion pieces less so. The honest position is to apply this where it improves the writing and decline where it would damage it.
Make sure the text is in the page
None of this matters if the words are not in the HTML a crawler receives. Text that appears only after scripts run, or only when a panel is opened, may not be seen. Check that the content is present in the page source, that headings reflect its structure, and that the page says plainly who wrote it and what the organisation does. Clear entity information is part of being quotable too.