In one sentence: write so that any hundred consecutive words from your page would still be true, still make sense, and still name their own subject if pasted into somebody else's reply.
That is the whole discipline. Everything below is a consequence of it.
Why the constraint is this specific
Answer engines retrieve passages, not documents. The model selects some span of your page and writes a reply from it. So the page is not being read; a fragment of it is being reused. A paragraph that only works in position — because the heading supplies the subject, or the previous paragraph supplies the condition — is unusable no matter how good the page is.
The eight rules
| Rule | The failure it prevents |
|---|---|
| Name the subject in the sentence carrying the fact | "It costs £49" is unusable; "The Pro plan costs £49" survives the cut |
| Answer in the first sentence under the heading | An answer three paragraphs down may not be in the selected span at all |
| One question per heading, phrased as a person asks it | Marketing headings match nothing anyone types |
| Facts in tables with units and dates | Facts in prose get paraphrased and drift |
| Explicit dates instead of "recently" or "currently" | Undated claims cannot be placed in time, so they lose to dated ones |
| State a number where you are tempted to hedge | "Varies by use case" cannot be quoted as an answer |
| Keep the substance in server-rendered HTML | Accordions, tabs and modals are invisible to most retrieval agents |
| Cite your own sources inline | A claim with a source attached is easier to reuse than a bare assertion |
The rule people resist
Answer-first writing feels like giving away the ending, and it shortens time on page, which some teams still treat as a quality signal. Both objections are real and both are outweighed: a page that gets quoted reaches people who were never going to scroll, and time on page was always a proxy for something you can now measure directly.
Stating numbers you might have to change
The reason so many pages hedge is fear of being wrong later. The answer is a date, not a hedge. "As of September 2026, the Pro plan is £49 per month" is safer than "pricing varies", because the date scopes the claim precisely — it tells the reader and the engine exactly what is and is not being asserted. Then put a review cadence on the pages that carry numbers.
The five-minute check
Fetch the page as plain HTML with JavaScript off. Find the heading matching a real question. Read the first two sentences under it, out of context. If they are a complete, correct answer that names its subject, the page passes.
Run this on your three most important pages before you write a fourth. Most teams discover the failure is structural and identical across all three, which means one template change fixes the whole site.