Yes, but it matters differently: traditional SEO helps you get crawled and indexed, while citation depends on off-domain mentions and structured clarity, not keyword density or backlink volume alone.
[01]/ the data
What we found
Zero-citation companies in our study largely had adequate on-page SEO but almost no third-party comparison coverage, showing SEO health alone doesn't predict AI citation.
[02]/ how to do it
Three steps
Keep core technical SEO healthy (indexability, site speed).
Layer schema markup on top.
Invest the majority of new effort into off-domain placement, which SEO alone doesn't cover.