How to write an answer an engine will quote

Put the answer in the first forty words, write every heading as the question its section settles, and attach the condition that makes the answer true. A passage that needs the paragraph above it to make sense will not be quoted by anything.

There is a version of this advice that is just "write clearly", and it is useless, because everybody believes they already do. Here is the specific version, in the order the decisions get made.

The title is the question, in their words

Not your words. The gap between how an industry names a thing and how a buyer asks about it is where most traffic goes missing. A firm writes "Post-merger brand architecture"; the person types "what happens to our name when we are acquired". Both describe the same work. Only one is a question anybody asks.

Where a page must carry the industry term for your own readers, put the question first and the term inside the body. The title is for the stranger; the body can serve both.

The first paragraph is the product

Roughly forty to sixty words. It answers the title outright. It contains the condition that makes the answer true. It does not warm up, does not restate the question, and does not promise that the answer is coming.

If the first paragraph were the only thing published, would it still be useful? That is the test.

Every heading is a question its section settles

A retrieved section arrives without the ones around it. "The exceptions" means nothing on its own. "When does a redirect lose authority?" means something on its own, and it also tells a skimming reader exactly whether to stop.

• No heading that depends on the previous one: "And the other case", "But first", "A caveat".
• No heading that is a label: "Considerations", "Best practices", "Key takeaways".
• No heading that is a joke. It costs you the retrieval and saves nobody any time.

Specifics are what make a passage worth lifting

A machine composing an answer prefers a passage that says something checkable. Figures, durations, thresholds, jurisdictions, versions, named exceptions. "It varies" is often the truthful summary, and it is never the quoted one — so give the range and what moves it within the range.

This is also where honesty and performance point the same way. A number you made up is both a fabrication and, once somebody checks it, a reason never to be cited again. A number you can point at is the strongest thing on the page.

Say where it came from

Where a statement rests on something — your own project, a public dataset, a regulation, a measurement — say so in the text and link it. Both readers and retrieval systems treat a sourced statement differently from an asserted one, and it protects you from your own drift when the page is revised in two years by somebody who was not there.

Show when it was last checked

Visibly, in the page, not only in the markup. On any subject that moves — pricing, regulation, platform behaviour — an undated page is treated as a page of unknown age, and unknown age is treated as old.

The checklist

1. The title is a question somebody would actually type.
2. The answer is complete within the first sixty words.
3. The condition or exception is attached to the answer, not saved for later.
4. Every heading stands alone as a question.
5. At least one checkable specific appears in each section.
6. Anything resting on a source says which source and links it.
7. A revision date is visible on the page.
8. The markup describes what the page actually says.