Speed matters. Not just a stable and secure website, a fast and responsive one. This is especially important in the AI era, and all of these attributes are covered by RebelMouse.
A webinar from Pantheon.io, which works to simplify tech stacks, echoed these talking points in “How to Win the War for Agentic Citations.” These latest findings are based on clear data and they follow up on the AEO Playbook that we covered recently.
Ellipsis has been examining AI data for more than a year and it led to a clear finding.
“By far, the resounding result, faster is better,” said Alex Denning, founder of Ellipsis, a company that focuses on B2B companies getting cited by AI. “Faster pages get cited much more than slow pages on slow websites.”
Highly-cited websites were 26% faster than low-cited pages. The fastest websites were defined as under 500 milliseconds. “Faster always performed better,” Denning reiterated.
Keeping up with the need to prioritize speed is critical.
“The web is always changing,” Pantheon cofounder Josh Koenig said, stressing the need to evolve with it.
Denning also dispelled a myth that AI can’t cite JavaScript. It can, but it often doesn’t, probably because those pages load slower, he said. Indeed, pages with JavaScript are 50% less likely to be cited, per Ellipsis.
“What it comes down to is your website needs to be easy to consume,” Koenig added. “Every millisecond costs [AI systems] money. They’re going to optimize to what costs less.”
“We know faster is better,” added Holly Enneking, VP of Marketing at Markup AI. “We’re experiencing that firsthand and we know AI returns answers back really quickly. We want to return our own websites as quickly as possible.”
Another finding from Ellipsis: Deeper page structure. More H2 headers in an article are cited more (10.5 for highly-cited sources vs. 7.7 baseline).
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