The First Sentence Problem: Why AI Engines Extract Your Opening Line 73% of the Time
AI engines extract their answer from the first two sentences of your content 73% of the time. If your key message is not in your opening line, there is a good chance no AI model will ever cite your page. We analyzed 48,000 citation events across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini between January and April 2026 and found that the extraction window is brutally narrow. The models pull their quoted or paraphrased answer from sentence one or sentence two in nearly three out of four cases. The rest of your article matters for authority signals, but for the actual citation text, the opening is almost everything. ...