Should you write your pages in Q&A format for AIs?
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It is not necessary. The Q&A format is not what gets a page cited by an AI. In our measurements, between 74% and 93% of pages cited by Claude and Gemini have a title that is not a question, and the effect of an interrogative title changes direction from one corpus to another. Seer Interactive even considers FAQ markup to be of no interest for Google's AI answers. What matters is that a page answers a specific question in depth, not that it takes its form.
For what type of question? It all depends on the question. An AI chooses the page based on the words of the question asked, not on its grammatical form: a page that carries these words in its title and answers in detail will be chosen, whether it is written in Q&A format or not.
What we measured regarding the question format
We classified the title of each cited page: interrogative if it ends with a question mark or starts with a word like how, why, or which, and nominal or declarative otherwise. Across our corpora—HVAC in French, artificial intelligence in English, about ten sectors in French then in English, and software troubleshooting—pages cited by Claude have an interrogative title in 7% to 26% of cases, and those cited by Gemini in 8% to 24% of cases. The vast majority of cited pages therefore do not take the form of a question.
The effect of this format is not stable. With ChatGPT, pages with interrogative titles were cited 1.47 times more often than others across the ten sectors in French, but 0.80 times in English, and in HVAC less than 3% of pages with interrogative titles were cited, compared to 13% of others. With Claude, the effect ranges from none to slightly positive. A rule that reverses from one corpus to another is not a rule.
What matters: the words of the question, not its format
What holds true, however, is the presence of the words of the question. With ChatGPT, a page whose title repeats the terms of the question is cited 1.3 to 1.9 times more often depending on the corpus; with Claude, a page address containing the question is cited 1.2 to 1.7 times more. A title like "schema.org markup and AI citations" contains the same words as the question without taking its form.
A classic Q&A page poses another problem: it lines up short answers. Yet, with Claude, a paragraph of 50 to 100 words is cited 3.7 to 4.8 times more often than a paragraph of 10 to 25 words. A two-line answer under each question produces exactly the type of paragraph that AIs cite the least.
What Google and other studies say
Google indicates that no special optimization or specific markup is necessary to appear in its AI answers. Seer Interactive, on AI Overviews in the United States in May 2026, concludes that FAQ and HowTo markups are of no interest for these answers, and observes that the sites that use them the most are not the best represented.
The advice to write in Q&A format comes from a reasonable intuition: users ask AIs questions. But the AI reformulates the question into multiple searches using its own words, then chooses a passage that answers it. The page format is no substitute for the right words or the depth of the answer.
Google's guide on optimizing for its generative AI features, updated on July 10, 2026, points in the same direction: there is no obligation to break content down into small pieces for the AI to understand it, as Google's systems are capable of distinguishing multiple topics on the same page, and it is not necessary to write in any particular way for AI search.
What this changes for a company
Rather than a Q&A page that skims over twenty topics, it is better to have one page per important question, with the question in the title and the address, the answer in the very first lines, and developed paragraphs. This is how this section is built, and it does not contain any FAQ blocks.
However, a frequent questions block at the bottom of a page does no harm, and it can help your visitors. You simply should not expect any effect on citations from it: our measurements show absolutely none.
What we do not know
We measured the format of the page title and the first heading, as well as the length of the cited paragraphs; we did not compare entire pages written in Q&A format to equivalent pages written otherwise. Our measurements are based on the models' API.
Sources
- Google Search Central — "AI features and your website", .
- Seer Interactive, Matt Buxbaum — what it takes to appear in AI Overviews in 2026, .
- Google Search Central — “Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search”, .
- FaireDuBruit measurements, from September 4 to 16, 2026 — see "How we measured".