Marketing
Being cited by AI now matters more than ranking in search
Individual generative AI use in Japan has reached 58.8%. The starting point for finding information is shifting from search engines to AI. That changes who reads your company website.
According to the 2026 White Paper on Information and Communications, individual use of generative AI in Japan is 58.8%. The previous survey put it at 26.7%. It more than doubled in a year.
The United States and Germany both sit at 75.6%, China at 93.6%. Among Japanese aged 15 to 19 it is 91.7%.
The consequence for company websites is a change in who, or what, is doing the reading.
The reader becomes an agent
When an AI system composes an answer, it reads source pages. The reader is a program.
For a human reader, layout, imagery and motion assist comprehension. For a program, all of that is discarded. What remains is text and its structure.
Most company sites are built on the assumption that a person is looking at them. Wording set inside an image. Content revealed on scroll. Body copy generated by JavaScript. All of it reaches people, and none of it exists as a citable source.
What you can check
Several checks tell you whether your site is readable by these systems.
Does the body text appear without JavaScript. View source and look for the actual copy. If it is not there, the page needs to render server side.
Is the heading structure correct. One h1 per page, with the heading hierarchy matching the content hierarchy. If heading levels were chosen for visual size, the structure is not readable.
Do the numbers have sources. When a system selects what to cite, verifiable statements are easier to use. An unsourced number may be avoided precisely because it cannot be confirmed.
Is there structured data. JSON-LD describing the organisation, the services and the articles. Invisible to people, visible to machines.
Check robots.txt and llms.txt. Are AI crawlers explicitly allowed. Some configurations block them by default.
Writing that gets cited
Passages that get cited share certain properties.
The claim and its evidence sit close together. The conclusion appears early in the paragraph. Numbers arrive with who measured them, when, and of what.
What gets cited less: text that withholds its conclusion across several paragraphs, claims whose support lives on another page, and heavily qualified phrasing.
Japanese business writing frequently places the conclusion at the end. That is fine for a human reader. It works against you when a fragment is being extracted.
Search engine optimisation was about improving a ranking. Optimising for AI is about being quoted accurately. Those are different objectives.
Order of work
Ranked by effect against effort:
- Confirm the body text renders server side
- Add sources to your numbers
- Fix the heading structure
- Add JSON-LD
- Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt
Items one and five take about an hour to check. They also produce the largest effect.
58.8% is a number still in motion. The United States and Germany are at 75.6%, China at 93.6%.