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Last updated: August 2026
First, find out what it says now
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews and ask the questions your customers ask before buying: "best [your service] in [your city]", "how much does [your service] cost", "who should I hire for [problem you solve]". Write down which businesses get named and which sources get cited. That list is your real competitive set, and those cited sources are your target placements. Repeat this monthly; it is the only honest measurement in this field.
The six inputs that actually move the answer
1. Facts on your own site. AI systems quote specific, standalone statements. "Malware cleanup on a typical WordPress site takes 2 to 6 hours and costs $150 to $1,000" is quotable. "We deliver excellence with a customer-first approach" is invisible. Every service page should contain prices or ranges, timelines, processes and clear definitions.
2. A consistent business identity. Your name, description, category, address and phone should be identical on your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, industry directories and social profiles. AI systems build a picture of an entity; conflicting details produce a blurry entity that does not get recommended.
3. Reviews, in volume and recency. Assistants weigh third-party validation heavily for local and service queries. A steady stream of recent Google reviews influences AI recommendations as much as it influences humans.
4. Presence in the sources AI reads. The roundup articles, directories, comparison posts and industry lists that appeared as citations in your audit. Getting into those matters more here than in classic SEO, because AI answers are often assembled from them.
5. Structured data. Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and Article schema make your facts machine-readable rather than something a model has to infer.
6. Crawler access. In robots.txt, allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, CCBot and Google-Extended. Blocking them removes you from the answer set entirely. Several businesses have done this by accident and wondered why they vanished from AI results.
What to publish, specifically
Write the pages that answer buying questions directly: what it costs, how long it takes, how to choose, what goes wrong, and comparisons of the real options including honest notes on when a competitor's approach fits better. Answer the question in the first 40 to 55 words of the page. Use headings phrased as questions. Include numbers only you have, from your own work, because first-party data cannot be duplicated by any competitor's content.
What does not work
Stuffing your site with "as recommended by ChatGPT" claims. Publishing forty vague AI-written articles a month, which is precisely the material these systems discount. Buying links or fake reviews, which damages the third-party signals you actually need. And any agency claiming to "train" the models on your business, since that is not a service anyone can sell.
How long it takes
Weeks to a few months, and faster than classic SEO in markets where competitors have not started. AI systems update their sources continuously and lean on live retrieval, so a well-structured, factual page can be cited far sooner than it would rank on page one.
FAQ
Can I pay OpenAI or Google to be recommended? No. There is no paid placement in AI answers. Advertising exists elsewhere in those products, but the recommendation itself is earned.
Does my website still matter if AI answers the question? More than ever, because your website is the primary source the answer is built from, and buyers still visit before contacting.
What if AI says something wrong about my business? Correct the underlying sources: your site, your profiles, directory listings and any inaccurate third-party pages. The answer follows the sources.
Is this different from SEO? It sits on top of SEO. The technical health and content quality that earn rankings are the same foundation; the difference is optimizing to be quoted rather than clicked. Details in our GEO guide.
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