How to get your business cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews

Understand what the engines are actually doing

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI Overviews a buying question, the engine assembles an answer from sources it can read, parse and trust. It leans on a small number of pages it treats as authoritative for that topic. Your job is to become one of those pages, not to rank tenth.

That means three things in order: the engine must be able to crawl you, understand who you are, and find clear, quotable statements that answer real questions.

Make yourself machine-readable

The first failure is invisible: many sites block the very crawlers that feed AI answers. Check that GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are not disallowed in your robots.txt. If you cannot see an explicit allow, treat it as a problem.

Then make your identity unambiguous. Structured data (schema.org) tells the engine your organisation name, what you do, where you are, and how you are reached. A machine that cannot resolve your entity into a clean, consistent record will not quote you with confidence.

• Allow the AI crawlers you want to be quoted by.
• Publish Organization and WebSite schema with your name, logo, contact and location.
• Add Service schema per offer, with the outcome you deliver.
• Keep your name, address and phone identical everywhere you appear.

Write content that answers the question, not the keyword

AI answers quote clear, self-contained statements. If a page circles a topic without ever stating a plain, correct answer, the engine has nothing safe to lift. Structure every page around real questions a buyer asks, and answer each one directly in the first sentence beneath a heading.

Prefer concrete facts: prices, timelines, counts, definitions. Specifics are quotable; adjectives are not. "Fixed builds from $1,200" is cited. "World-class solutions" is discarded.

Build the questions you get asked

List the ten questions buyers ask you before they hire. For each, create a section or a page that answers it plainly. A visible FAQ, marked up with FAQPage schema, is one of the most reliable ways to appear inside AI answers because the question-to-answer mapping is already explicit.

Measure, then compound

Once a month, ask the major engines your buying questions and record who they name. Track your own business and your competitors. Citation share moves slowly and then quickly. The businesses that win are the ones that keep publishing answers and keep their entity records clean.