HOW GOOGLE PICKS WHICH SENTENCES TO CITE IN AI MODE—REVERSE-ENGINEERING 42,971 CITATIONS

Summary from the TLDR Marketing newsletter

Google AI Mode often cites short sentences near the top of a page and favors structured content. Cited sentences average about 10 words, and none exceed 17 words. Most cited sentences appear about 34.9% down the page, and structured pages show a 91.3% sentence match rate compared to 39.3% for unstructured pages. Only 25.3% of cited URLs appear in the organic top 10 search results, and 74.7% come from outside those rankings. The median cited page is 2.2 years old, and over 52% of cited content is more than two years old.