How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Answers

When a customer asks ChatGPT “who’s the best physio near me” or “what’s a good alternative to Mailchimp for a small shop”, the answer names a handful of businesses. The rest might as well not exist. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is the work of becoming one of the names.

We’ll walk through how AI assistants pick their sources, what makes a page worth citing, and how to tell whether your efforts are working.

How AI assistants choose what to cite

Most AI assistants answer questions about businesses, products and services by searching the web in the moment, reading a few pages, and summarizing what they find. The pages they read come from search indexes.

That has a big implication: you can’t be cited if you can’t be found. Google states that to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, a page must be indexed and eligible to show in Google Search. ChatGPT’s search features depend on OpenAI’s own crawler, which brings us to the first fix.

Step 1: Let the right crawlers in

AI companies run several different bots, and they don’t all do the same job. OpenAI’s crawler documentation is a good example:

We regularly find small business sites that block AI bots wholesale, often through a security plugin or a copied robots.txt file. If you want to be recommended, check that the search crawlers are allowed.

Step 2: Build on a solid SEO foundation

Because AI answers draw on indexed, well-ranking pages, the basics of SEO carry straight over: fast, crawlable pages; content that’s rendered in the HTML rather than only after JavaScript runs; clean titles and headings; and pages that deserve to rank for the questions your customers ask. Our guide to what still works in SEO in 2026 covers these in more detail.

Step 3: Write pages an AI can quote

AI assistants lift short, self-contained passages that answer a question directly. Make those passages easy to find:

• Lead with the answer. Put a two or three sentence answer at the top of the page or section, then expand.
• Use question-style headings that match how people actually ask (“How much does a Shopify rebuild cost?” rather than “Pricing considerations”).
• One clear topic per page. A page that answers one question well beats a page that half-answers ten.
• Use lists and tables for steps, comparisons and specs. They’re easy for people to scan and easy for AI to extract.
• Be specific. Numbers, named processes, locations and real examples make a passage more useful than a vague claim.

Step 4: Keep your important pages fresh

AI assistants favor recent information, especially for commercial questions. In its 2026 State of AI Search report, AirOps found that 83% of AI citations for commercial and evaluation-stage queries came from pages updated within the previous 12 months.

Put a review date on your key pages and actually review them. Update prices, screenshots, product names and examples, and show the “last updated” date clearly.

Step 5: Make your business a clear, consistent entity

AI systems piece together what your business is from many sources beyond your own website. If your name, description, services and locations differ from one place to the next, you’re harder to recommend with confidence.

• Use the same business name, description and contact details everywhere: your site, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, LinkedIn and industry directories.
• Describe what you do in plain, consistent language, so a model can summarize you accurately.
• Add structured data (Organization, LocalBusiness, Product, Article) so search engines can read the key facts reliably. It isn’t a shortcut into AI answers, but it removes ambiguity.

Step 6: Earn mentions beyond your own site

When an AI assistant recommends businesses, it’s often summarizing what other people say: review sites, comparison articles, industry publications, forums and local news. Your own site can explain what you do; third-party sources confirm it.

Practical ways to build that:

• Ask happy customers for reviews, consistently rather than in bursts. (Then make sure those reviews are machine-readable. Our Shopify app, Review Optimiza, syncs them into structured data automatically.)
• Pitch useful data or expert commentary to publications your customers read.
• Get listed in the reputable directories and “best of” roundups for your category.
• Answer questions genuinely in the communities where your customers hang out.

Step 7: Measure your AI visibility

AEO used to be hard to measure. It’s getting easier:

• Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report (launched in February 2026) shows how often Microsoft Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries cite your pages, and which “grounding queries” led there.
• Analytics referrals from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com show real visits from AI answers.
• Manual prompt checks. Keep a list of 10 to 20 questions your customers ask, run them in the major assistants each month, and record whether and how you’re mentioned.
• Branded search in Google Search Console often rises when AI answers start naming you.

Putting it together

AEO builds on SEO for a world where the first reader of your page is often an AI. Be findable, answer clearly, stay current, be consistent, and give other people reasons to mention you.

If you’d like a team that builds your site with this in mind from day one and keeps optimizing it after launch, talk to us.