How to Get Cited in Brave Leo AI Citations

By UpGeo · 2026-09-01

To show up as a source citation in Brave Leo, your page needs three things: Brave Search has to index it, Bravebot has to be allowed to crawl it, and it has to contain a factual claim a language model can extract on its own. Leo grounds its web answers in Brave Search, not Google. If Brave’s retrieval pipeline can’t index and parse your page, it can’t appear as a source card. That’s generative engine optimization (GEO), not a prompt-engineering hack.

How Brave Leo selects sources

Brave Leo is the privacy-first assistant inside the Brave browser. Whenever it needs current web information, it runs a Brave Search query and returns an answer with source citations. Three things determine whether your page gets cited:

• Index inclusion: The URL has to be in Brave’s independent index. If Brave has never crawled the page, it can’t be cited.
• Retrieval rank: Leo prefers content that’s already relevant and authoritative for the query. A 2024 SE Ranking study of 100,000 queries found 93.2% of Google AI Overview citations came from top-10 organic results. Retrieval-grounded assistants like Leo work the same way because they cite what search surfaces first.
• Extractability: The page needs a clear, named, dated, quotable answer. If the model can’t isolate the claim, it will cite a cleaner source instead.

Step 1: Make your site indexable by Brave Search

Brave Search relies on its own crawler, Bravebot, plus the Web Discovery Project. You can’t submit a URL through a Google-style console, so the practical work is removing crawl barriers.

• Allow Bravebot in robots.txt: User-agent: Bravebot followed by Allow: /.
• Do not block /llms.txt, /sitemap.xml, or article pages.
• Serve server-rendered HTML. Bravebot can execute some JavaScript, but plain HTML in the initial response is the most reliable path.
• Use an XML sitemap with lastmod dates and add it to robots.txt.
• Keep canonical tags consistent and remove duplicate or near-duplicate pages.

Bravebot recrawls pages that earn engagement and links, so publish pages worth linking to and point to them from pages already indexed.

Step 2: Structure content for extractable citations

LLM citations tend to favor pages that reduce the model’s work. Make the answer impossible to miss.

• Answer first: Put a direct, standalone answer within the first 50 words.
• Use question headings: Structure H2s and H3s around the questions people actually ask Leo.
• Include a quotable definition: Use a single sentence that can be lifted as a citation, often in a <blockquote>.
• Add data with attribution and date: “According to [Organization], [statistic] as of [month year]” gives the model a citable fact.
• Keep paragraphs short: Stick to one idea per paragraph; long paragraphs dilute extractability.
• Use structured data: Add Article, FAQPage, HowTo, Organization, and Person schema to resolve entities and authorship.

For example, swap “Many marketers wonder whether AI citations matter” for “93.2% of Google AI Overview citations come from top-10 organic results, according to SE Ranking (2024).” The second version gives Leo a specific fact to cite.

Step 3: Publish an llms.txt file

An llms.txt file is a Markdown summary of your site built for language models. List the pages you want cited, the core claim on each page, entity information, and contact details. Even if Leo doesn’t read llms.txt directly, this file helps AI crawlers and downstream retrieval systems understand which pages are canonical sources.

Create a file at /llms.txt with sections for:

• Site name, organization, and one-line description.
• Top 5–10 pages with their primary factual claim.
• Named entities, statistics, and definitions you want quoted.
• Contact and update date.

Use the free llms.txt generator to create a clean file without formatting errors, then link it from your robots.txt and sitemap.

Step 4: Give AI crawlers a clean path

Leo is one consumer of AI-readable content, but other assistants and retrieval systems share the same infrastructure. Allow the current AI crawlers you want to be indexed by, and block only those you do not want. Check the AI crawlers user-agent list before editing robots.txt, because rules change frequently.

• Keep desktop response times below 600ms; slow pages get shallower crawls.
• Avoid cookie walls and full-page interstitials for crawler traffic.
• Serve the same content to Bravebot and human visitors. Cloaking can get you dropped.
• Fix broken links and soft 404s; these waste crawl budget and reduce index coverage.

Step 5: Monitor and iterate

Signals that your GEO work is reaching Brave Leo:

• Server logs show more Bravebot and AI-related crawler hits after you publish or update a page.
• A site:example.com search in Brave returns your target page.
• When you ask Leo “What is the source for that?” it names your page or domain.
• Your target page appears in positions 1–5 in Brave Search for core questions.

Re-test monthly because Leo’s retrieval behavior and Brave’s index change. Update dates, add fresh data, and rewrite the first paragraph if the top-ranking source has changed.

Brave Leo citation readiness checklist

Area	Action	Why it matters
Crawl access	Allow Bravebot in robots.txt	Without crawl access, no index inclusion
Indexation	Server-rendered HTML, XML sitemap, canonical tags	Brave must parse and store the page
Extractability	Answer in first 50 words, use quotable facts	LLMs cite what they can isolate cleanly
Schema	Add Article, FAQPage, Organization, Person	Resolves entities, authorship, recency
AI file	Publish /llms.txt and link from robots.txt	Declares canonical pages and claims to AI systems
Monitoring	Check Brave site: queries and server logs	Confirms citation path before manual testing

Start with crawl access and extractability. Most sites fail at one of those two stages: either Bravebot cannot index the page, or the page contains no clean factual sentence for the model to cite. Fix those first, then maintain an llms.txt file and monitor Brave Search visibility.