How to get your business mentioned by ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers

To be cited by an AI assistant, three things have to be true. Its crawler must be allowed to read your site. Your page must answer the question directly, in language that matches how people ask it. And something outside your website must confirm that you exist and are who you say you are.

Miss any one of those and you are invisible, no matter how good your site looks. Most businesses miss the first one without ever knowing it.

This is usually called generative engine optimisation, or GEO. It is not a replacement for SEO, it is what SEO becomes when the search result is a paragraph instead of a list of links.

Why does this matter now?

Because the shape of the answer changed. A traditional result gave ten links and let the person choose. An AI answer gives one paragraph and names two or three sources. The click-through curve used to be a slope. Now it is more like a cliff, and it matters enormously whether you are one of the names in the paragraph.

For a small business this is unusually good news. Ranking first on a competitive keyword takes years and a budget. Being the clearest answer to a specific question is achievable this quarter, because most of your competitors are still writing brochures.

First, check you are not blocking the crawlers

This is the one that quietly ruins everything else, and it is worth checking today.

Assistants read the web through named crawlers, GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, ClaudeBot for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, Google-Extended for Google’s AI products. Plenty of sites block every one of them, sometimes deliberately, very often by accident, because a security setting or a plugin switched it on with one friendly-sounding toggle.

Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt and read it. If you see your domain disallowing those names, that is your answer, and no amount of content will fix it while it stands. It is also the cheapest win in this entire article, because turning it off takes about a minute.

There is a real decision underneath it. Allowing those crawlers means AI companies can use your pages, including for training. For most businesses, being quotable is worth far more than the content is worth withheld. But it is your call, and you should make it deliberately rather than discovering it by accident a year later.

Write the answer, not the build-up

This is the biggest change in how you write, and it feels wrong at first.

A model pulling an answer reads the top of your page and decides quickly whether you have said anything useful. If your first paragraph is scene-setting, it moves on. Put the answer in the first hundred words, then spend the rest of the page earning it.

A few things follow from that:

• Make your headings the questions people ask. “How much does AI automation cost?” gets matched to a real query. “Pricing philosophy” does not.
• Answer in self-contained chunks. A paragraph that only makes sense after reading the two above it cannot be lifted into an answer. Write so any section can stand alone.
• Be specific and quotable. Numbers, named methods, clear definitions. Vague confidence gets skipped, precision gets quoted.
• Add a real FAQ section. Six or so genuine questions with short, direct answers. It is the single most extractable format there is.
• Say the plain words your customers say. If they say “chase invoices” and you say “receivables optimisation”, you have written yourself out of the match.

You will notice this is just good writing with the padding removed. That is rather the point, and it is why this work survives the next model update.

Make the machine-readable version match

Structured data is how you tell a machine what your page is, rather than making it infer. It is not a ranking trick, it is a translation layer, and skipping it makes clear content structurally invisible to some retrieval systems.

The useful ones are unglamorous. Mark up your articles as articles, your FAQs as FAQs, and your business as an organisation with a real address, phone number and profiles. That last one does more than people expect, because it connects the name on your site to a thing in the world.

Be findable outside your own website

Here is the uncomfortable part. Your website alone is not enough, because anyone can claim anything on their own site.

Assistants lean on corroboration. A directory listing, a business profile with reviews, a real presence on the platforms your industry uses, a mention somewhere you do not control. Each one is a small vote that you exist and do what you say.

If you take one action from this section, claim and complete your business profile with your real address, hours and category. It is free, it is boring, and it is consistently one of the strongest signals available to a small business trying to be recognised as a distinct entity.

How do you know if it is working?

Differently than you are used to, and less precisely. There is no rank tracker for a paragraph.

Do the obvious thing: ask. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and ask the questions a customer would actually ask, the ones about the problem rather than your company name. Note who gets named. Repeat monthly. It is rough, and it is more informative than any dashboard right now.

Then watch referrals from assistant domains in your analytics, and watch whether people arriving already know what you do. That is the real tell. AI-referred visitors tend to arrive pre-qualified, because they were handed a recommendation rather than a link.

The honest summary

Let the crawlers in. Answer the question in the first paragraph. Use the words your customers use. Mark it up so machines can parse it. Exist somewhere other than your own domain.

None of it is a trick, and none of it expires when the models change, because all of it amounts to being genuinely, checkably useful about a specific thing. That was always what worked. The audience just changed.

Questions people ask us

What is generative engine optimisation, or GEO?

GEO is the practice of making your content likely to be quoted inside AI-generated answers, such as ChatGPT replies, Perplexity results and Google AI Overviews, rather than only ranking in a list of blue links. It overlaps heavily with good SEO, but prioritises direct answers, clear structure and verifiable authority.

How do I know if my site is blocked from ChatGPT?

Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for rules disallowing GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended. If those names appear with Disallow, assistants are being told to stay out. Security products and CDNs often add these automatically, so check even if you never set it yourself.

Does blocking AI crawlers protect my content?

It reduces the chance your pages are used for training, but it also removes you from the answers your customers are reading. For most service businesses, being quotable is worth more than the content is worth withheld, though it is a legitimate business decision either way.

Is GEO different from SEO?

They share most of their foundations, crawlability, useful content, and authority. GEO differs in emphasis: answers stated up front rather than built toward, question-shaped headings, self-contained sections that can be lifted out, structured data, and corroboration from sources you do not own.

How long does it take to show up in AI answers?

Faster than traditional rankings for specific questions, slower for broad ones. Assistants that retrieve live results can pick up a genuinely useful page within weeks. Being recognised as an established name is a longer game that depends on mentions beyond your own site.

Do I need to publish a lot of content?

Volume helps less than coverage. A handful of pages that each answer one real question completely will outperform many shallow posts, because the assistant is looking for the clearest answer to a specific query rather than the biggest library.