Answer-first structure with question headings
Question-style headings with a direct answer near the top match how agents extract passages, and across sites cited text skews to the top of the page. Within a site, Toronto found headings and FAQ blocks had no effect, so treat it as a writing habit, not a lever.
Real evidence that depends on platform/context, or sources conflict.
Downgraded to Mixed (Oct 2026 audit). The Growth Memo study is correlational across sites; Toronto 2610.15033 found headings null within a site and the best-matching paragraph at a median 45% down the page ("need not be at the top").
How to fix
Answer the main question right under your H1, and use buyers' questions as headings. The evidence is Mixed (one ChatGPT study found 44% of citations came from a page's first third; another found headings made no difference), so treat it as a cheap readability fix.
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Put a direct answer of one to three sentences right after your H1, with no heading or image in between.
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Keep that answer between about 40 and 900 characters.
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Phrase at least a third of your H2 and H3 headings as questions: start with How, What, Why, When, Which, Can, Does or Is, or end with a question mark.
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Answer each question in the first sentence under it, then add detail.
<h1>Payroll software for small UK teams</h1> <p>Acme Payroll runs payroll, pensions and payslips for UK teams of 2 to 50.</p> <h2>How much does Acme Payroll cost?</h2> <p>Plans start at £29 a month for up to 5 people.</p>
How to check it worked: run the free check again. The "Questions answered up front" row should pass: "Your headings ask questions, and the answers come right after."
What the free check looks for
- Measure share of H2/H3 that are questions; check whether the first ~150 words after H1 contain a direct definitional answer; flag long preambles; check extractable lists/tables.
Caveats
- — Correlational studies dominate this field. AI citations churn: a small 15-prompt preprint (arXiv 2609.22655; the author sells AI-visibility tooling) saw each engine's cited URL set change by about 67% on average from one day to the next, with under 1% URL overlap across engines. Toronto (2610.15033) found only about 40% of the within-site pattern of ChatGPT citations still held two weeks later, and 14% after ten weeks. Re-verify yearly.
- — Included in the free page check.
Studies and docs
2026
Kevin Indig / Growth Memo, 18,012 verified ChatGPT citations: 44.2% came from the first 30% of a page's text, 31.1% from the middle, 24.7% from the last third; 78.4% of citations tied to questions came from headings. Correlational, across sites.
2026
Within a site, headings and FAQ blocks showed no consistent citation effect; the paragraph that best matched the query sat at a median 45% of page length and "need not be at the top".
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