Blog, AI search and SEO, 8 min read
How to get your business mentioned by ChatGPT and Perplexity
People are asking AI for recommendations instead of searching. Here is what actually makes you show up in those answers.
A growing share of "who should I hire for X" questions now get asked to an AI assistant instead of a search engine. If the answer names three companies and you are not one of them, that is a channel you are absent from. The practices for showing up have a name now, generative engine optimization, though most of it is just clear writing plus a few technical basics.
Understand what the model is doing
When someone asks for a recommendation, the assistant either searches the web live and cites what it finds, or answers from what it absorbed during training, or both. You can influence all three paths, but they need different things.
- Live search: you need pages that answer the question directly and load without JavaScript.
- Training data: you need to be written about, by you and by others, consistently, over time.
- Citations: you need a page that is the obvious thing to link when answering that question.
Write the page that answers the question
The single highest value thing is having a page per real question, with the answer near the top in plain language. Not "Our Services", but "How much does a pitch deck cost" with a number in the first paragraph.
Assistants quote passages. Make yours quotable: a claim, then the detail under it. Long throat clearing before the answer gets skipped, by people and by machines.
The technical bits that matter
- Your content must exist in the HTML. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so a site that renders everything client side is invisible to them even though Google sees it fine.
- Add an llms.txt at your root: a plain text summary of what you do, your services and your best pages. It costs an hour and it is exactly what a model wants.
- Allow the AI crawlers in robots.txt. GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and the rest. Blocking them is a choice to be absent.
- Use structured data. Organization, Service, FAQPage and Article markup make your pages machine readable rather than machine guessable.
Be consistent everywhere
Models build a picture of you from many sources. If your site says you are a production studio, your LinkedIn says creative agency, and your directory listings say freelance designer, none of those signals reinforce each other. Pick one description of what you do and use the same words everywhere.
Get mentioned off your own site
Your own pages establish what you claim. Other people mentioning you establishes that it is true. Directory listings, a guest post, a podcast, a case study on a client site, an answer on a forum where the question is genuinely yours to answer. Third party mentions do more for AI recommendations than they do for classic rankings.
How to check
Ask the assistants the questions your customers would ask, in the wording they would use, and write down who gets named. Do it monthly. It is a crude measure and it is the only direct one you have. If a competitor keeps appearing, go and read the page that is getting cited; it will usually be a plain, specific answer to the exact question.