The question I get asked most about AI search is the blunt one. How do I get my business to come up when someone asks ChatGPT?

You get named in AI answers by being retrievable, being quotable, being recognisable as an entity, and being mentioned on the third-party pages models lean on. There is no submission form and no ranking dial. There are, however, a handful of things that demonstrably move it.

What follows is what I actually do, in the order I would do it. If you want the background on what GEO is before the tactics, start with what is GEO.

Key Takeaways

  • If a model cannot retrieve and read your page, nothing else on this list matters.
  • Models lift clean, specific claims. Burying the answer four paragraphs down costs you the citation.
  • Being named depends heavily on third-party coverage, because that is what gets cited for recommendation questions.
  • Check what the tools currently say about you before changing anything. Wrong answers are often fixable at the source.

Start With Whether You Can Be Retrieved At All

Most AI tools answer by running a search, fetching a few pages and reading them. If that fetch fails, you are out before the judging starts.

Check the obvious things. Your content should be in the HTML the server returns, not assembled by JavaScript afterwards, because several crawlers do not execute it. Your robots.txt should not be blocking the AI crawlers unless you have decided you want to be excluded, which is a legitimate choice but should be deliberate. Pages should load quickly and return proper status codes.

This is ordinary technical SEO, which is the point. The entry requirement for AI search is the thing you should already be doing.

Write Answers A Model Can Lift

Open with the answer. Then explain it.

A model summarising your page is looking for a sentence it can repeat without having to reconstruct your argument. If your definition arrives in paragraph six, after the scene setting, it is far less likely to be the sentence that gets used. Put the direct answer in the first hundred words, then earn the rest of the read.

Be specific. "Prices start at £950 a month" is quotable. "Competitively priced" is not. Specific claims also make you checkable, which is part of why they get used.

Match your headings to the questions people actually ask. A heading reading "How much does an SEO consultant cost?" is a better retrieval target than "Our Pricing Philosophy".

Ground Your Brand As An Entity

Models work with entities, not just strings of text. They are more confident naming a business they can place.

Practically, that means your schema markup should describe your organisation properly and consistently on every page, with a stable identifier, and sameAs links pointing at your profiles elsewhere. One business entity across the site, not a different one per page. I had to fix exactly that on this site, so it is an easy mistake to make.

Your name, address, phone number and description should match everywhere they appear. Models cross-reference, and inconsistency makes them hedge.

Where a Wikidata entry or an industry register entry exists for your business, make sure it is accurate. These are high-trust grounding sources and they punch well above their traffic.

Get Mentioned Where The Models Look

This is the uncomfortable one, because it is the least controllable and probably the most important.

Ask any chatbot to recommend a supplier in your category and look at what it cites. It is rarely a company homepage. It is roundups, comparison articles, review platforms, industry directories and forum threads. Models treat those as the places where opinion lives, and a recommendation question is a question about opinion.

So the work is getting into those sources: being listed in the directories that matter in your sector, appearing in the roundups people write about your category, having reviews somewhere models can read them, and being quoted in industry coverage. This is close to digital PR, with one difference. For AI citation an unlinked mention still counts, because the model is reading the text rather than following the link.

Keep Your Facts Consistent Everywhere

If three sources disagree about what you do, a model will either pick one or avoid the claim. Neither helps.

Decide the short description of your business, the services you offer and the areas you serve, then use the same wording on your site, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories and anywhere else you appear. Repetition feels dull when you are writing it. It is the point.

Structure Pages So The Right Bit Is Quotable

Long pages get skimmed by models much as they do by people. Help them find the part that answers the question.

Use proper heading hierarchy rather than styled text. Keep paragraphs short enough to be lifted whole. Put comparisons in a table, because tabular data survives summarising unusually well. Mark up genuine FAQ sections with FAQ schema, and keep the marked-up answers identical to the visible ones.

Dates matter more than they used to. Models often prefer recent sources, so a visible published and updated date, matching your schema, is worth having.

Watch What The Models Actually Say About You

Before you change anything, find out where you stand. Write down the ten questions a good prospect might ask, the ones where you would want to be mentioned, and run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot.

Record whether you appear, which sources get cited instead, and whether anything said about you is wrong. That last column is the one that usually produces immediate work, and the fix is often correcting a directory entry or an old page rather than anything clever.

Repeat monthly. Answers shift between sessions and users, so treat one run as a sample, not a verdict.

What Not To Bother With

A few things are being sold that I would not spend money on yet.

Hidden text aimed at models is the old keyword stuffing with a new audience, and it carries the same risk from search engines that can still see it. Stuffing pages with "as an AI language model" style phrasing does nothing. Paying to be added to AI training data is not a thing you can buy for a small business. And any tool promising a precise AI ranking position is reporting a number with more confidence than the underlying variation supports.

The work that pays is unglamorous: be findable, be clear, be consistent, be mentioned. If you want someone to run that properly, it is what I do as GEO consultancy within the wider AI SEO services. Get in touch and I will start by telling you what the tools say about you today.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you rank in ChatGPT?

You cannot rank in ChatGPT the way you rank in Google, because there is no results page. You get named by being retrievable, which means your content is in the HTML and not blocked, by being quotable, which means leading with specific answers, by being recognisable as an entity through consistent schema and profiles, and by being mentioned on the third-party pages models cite.

Does schema markup help with AI search?

Yes, mainly for entity grounding. Consistent organisation markup with a stable identifier and sameAs links pointing at your other profiles helps a model place who you are and name you with confidence. It is not a ranking lever so much as a disambiguation one.

Why does ChatGPT cite other sites instead of mine?

For recommendation questions models tend to cite roundups, comparison articles, review platforms and forum threads rather than company homepages, because those are where opinion lives. Getting into those sources matters more than optimising your own page for that type of question.

Can you pay to appear in AI answers?

Not meaningfully. Paying to be added to training data is not something a small business can buy, and tools promising a precise AI ranking position report numbers with more confidence than the underlying variation supports. The work that pays is being findable, clear, consistent and mentioned elsewhere.