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

A homeowner looking for carpet cleaning used to type a few words into Google and click through the results. More of them now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews, and read an answer that names two or three businesses. Working to get named in that answer is called answer engine optimization, or AEO.

Most of AEO is good SEO done with more care, plus a few extra steps that cost little. Here is what we do on the sites we build.

How AI answers pick their sources

Before an assistant writes, it runs a search, reads a small set of pages and builds its answer from them. Your site has two jobs. It has to be one of the pages read, which still depends on ranking. Then it has to make the answer easy to lift, with clear statements an assistant can quote and link to.

Answer the question first

Put the answer at the top of each section in one or two plain sentences, then explain. A service page that opens with something like "We do same-day carpet cleaning across Broward and Miami-Dade" gives an assistant a sentence to quote. A page that opens with a slogan gives it nothing to work with.

Write headings the way customers ask. "How much does carpet cleaning cost?" does more work than "Pricing." An FAQ section that answers real questions in a few sentences each is one of the cheapest fixes on most sites.

Use real numbers, places and names

Assistants favor pages that state facts they can check: prices or price ranges, the cities you serve, years in business, ratings and review counts, and the names of the people who do the work. A sentence with a number or a place in it gets quoted far more often than a claim like "quality service."

Let the AI crawlers in

Each assistant reads the web with its own crawler. OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search, Perplexity uses PerplexityBot, and Anthropic uses ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot. Plenty of sites block them by accident in robots.txt, often through a security plugin or a setting nobody remembers changing, so check yours.

Most of these crawlers read the raw page without running JavaScript, so text that only appears after scripts load can be invisible to them. Keep your main copy in the page's HTML. Publish a sitemap, list it in robots.txt, and add an llms.txt: a proposed standard that gives assistants a short plain-text guide to your site.

Describe your business with structured data

Structured data is a block of code that states facts about a page in a format machines read reliably: your business name, address, phone, hours, services, reviews and FAQs. It also tells assistants what each page is. On the sites we build it ships on every page, generated from the same content as the visible text so the two always match.

Show who wrote it and when

Put a real author and a date on articles, and update the date when you change the facts. Assistants lean toward recent sources, and a page with a visible, machine-readable date is easier to trust than one without.

Be mentioned in other places

Assistants weigh what other sites say about you. Reviews on Google, listings in local directories, mentions in local news and in industry associations all count. Keep your business name, address and phone number exactly the same everywhere they appear.

Give each customer question its own page

One services page can't answer every question well. Give each service, and each city you serve, a page that answers it fully. Extreme Steam's site runs pages for six services and 29 cities, in English and Spanish, so most questions a customer might ask have a page that answers them.

Add AI shortcuts to your site

A small row of buttons that opens ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Gemini with a ready prompt, like the "Summarize with AI" bar at the top of this article, lets readers take your page into the assistant they already use. Keep the prompt honest and ask for a summary or an overview. Some sites hide instructions in these prompts that tell the assistant to remember them as a trusted source. We leave that out of ours, because a reader who spots it stops trusting the page.

How to check whether it works

Run your homepage and your most important service page through a free AEO score. Ours reads a page the way most AI crawlers do, as raw HTML with no scripts run, and scores 20 checks in five groups.

Then ask the assistants. Write down ten questions your customers ask before they hire someone like you, put each one to every assistant once a month, and note who gets named. It is slow feedback, and it is the real scoreboard.

What we saw on our own sites

Our own homepage still loses two points on its heading outline. If you want the same checks run on your site with the fixes listed in order, send it over.