Put your answer in the first 100 words
Your page doesn’t open with real prose. The first thing a machine reads is navigation, widgets, or preamble, and that’s expensive: Surfer’s citation study found that almost 40% of AI citations are pulled from a page’s first 100 words, with citation share falling off fast after that. The top of your page isn’t the introduction. It’s the citation surface.
Why do AI systems quote the top of the page?
Token economy. Every retrieval system trades information gained against tokens spent reading, the same way a busy human trades insight against minutes. A page that delivers its answer in the first paragraph is a cheap, high-value source. A page that makes the model read 800 words to find the point is an expensive one, and the model has thirty other candidates open.
This shows up in the citation data as a steep top-of-page skew, and it compounds with the gatekeeping that happens even earlier: Ahrefs’ 1.4M-prompt study found ChatGPT judges title, snippet, and URL before opening a page at all, then cites only about half of what it retrieves. Every stage rewards the same thing, which is a page that states its point immediately.
What does a strong opening look like?
Journalists have called it BLUF for decades: bottom line up front. In your first 100 words, state the answer or main claim in the first sentence or two, declaratively enough to be lifted verbatim. Include the key entities and numbers, meaning names, prices, and dates, because facts are what get quoted while throat-clearing never is.
Then expand with context and caveats for the readers who keep going. If you read your opening aloud and it could introduce any page on any site, it fails the test. A stranger should be able to read only your first paragraph and correctly summarize what the page claims.
What tends to fail this check?
Three page shapes, all common. Hub pages that open with a menu of links and a hero image but no prose, which is why we prescribe a short intro paragraph even on index pages. Pages that begin with a long anecdote before the point, which read warmly to humans and cost you the citation window.
And JavaScript-heavy pages whose opening text isn’t in the raw HTML at all, which is a different, bigger problem that this check inherits.
How do you retrofit existing pages?
Read your page and find the sentence where it finally says the thing. It’s usually three paragraphs down. Move that sentence to the top, keep everything else, and you’ve promoted the conclusion rather than deleted the body.
Twenty minutes per page, and it pairs naturally with the section-level version of the same discipline: an answer-first opening for the page, then a front-loaded answer under every heading, each one matched to a question people actually ask.
Then rescan. This check is worth 10 points and rests on the hardest data in our methodology, which you can verify yourself at the links above.
See where your site stands. The free scan takes about fifteen seconds and shows every fix.
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