Practical guide
How to get cited by AI search
Twelve plain-English moves that help ChatGPT, Google's AI, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity find, trust and cite your brand. The basics everyone should do, with what's known and what isn't.
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Why bother
People are asking AI tools about your market, and the answers help decide who they call, buy from and trust. If your brand isn't in that answer, or is described badly, the old search reports won't warn you.
The good news is that most of what gets a brand into those answers is familiar craft: clear information, good coverage, a consistent story. The less good news is that the details differ by tool, they shift while you read about them, and a lot of what's being sold as certainty is confident guessing. This is the calm version.
Twelve things to do
Roughly in order of value for effort. Do the first five before anything else.
1. Let the AI crawlers in
If AI bots are blocked in your robots.txt, your pages can't be read or cited. Check today; it's the most common own goal I see. At minimum, allow Googlebot and Bingbot (which feed Google's AI and Copilot), GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (OpenAI), ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User (Anthropic), and PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User. Decide deliberately about training-only crawlers such as Google-Extended, Applebot-Extended, Meta-ExternalAgent and CCBot. Also check your firewall or CDN isn't blocking them by default; several now do.
2. Use one name, consistently, everywhere
If your homepage says Acme Corp, your contact page says Acme Limited and LinkedIn says Acme Group, you're giving AI three entities and asking it to pick one. Choose a name and use it on every page, in your schema, and across your third-party listings.
3. Put real people's names on your content
Bylines with a role, relevant experience and a way to check who someone is matter, especially in health, finance and law. A page written by "the team" gives AI little reason to trust it.
4. Date everything, and show when you updated it
AI tools lean towards recent sources. AirOps found pages not updated in over a year were about twice as likely to lose their citations.[1] Show a published date and a last-updated date, and update the pages that matter.
5. Show your sources
When you make a claim, link to the study, regulator or official guidance behind it. Pages that show their working are easier to trust and easier to quote. The original GEO research paper from Princeton and others found that adding citations, quotations and statistics improved visibility in AI answers by up to 40% in their tests.[2]
6. Say something only you can say
"Seven tips for first-time buyers" is something AI can write without you. A first-hand account, original data or a clear opinion from someone who knows is something it needs your page for. Aim for the second.
7. Make pages easy to lift from
Clear headings, short paragraphs, the answer before the detail, lists and tables where they help. AI tools extract passages, not whole pages. There's no ideal length; make a page as long as the subject needs.
Put the question people actually ask in the title and the first paragraph. In a month-long Ahrefs test, pages that stayed cited longest in Google's AI answers had titles that matched the question more closely, and an academic study of 158,000 AI answers found the same within individual websites.[6][7]
8. Link your own pages the way your subjects connect
A main page on a topic, deeper pages on the parts of it, and links between them. It shows crawlers and AI the shape of what you know.
9. Earn coverage where AI already looks
This is the big one for PR people. Most AI citations point to other people's pages, not brands' own.[3] Which outlets matter depends heavily on your sector: in some it's national press, in others trade titles, review sites, reference sites or industry bodies. Find out which ones AI actually cites for your market before deciding where to pitch. Paid placements and citation farms are a waste; AI tools largely ignore them.
Being named matters more than being linked. When Ahrefs asked the same questions every day for 20 days, more than half the websites ChatGPT and Google's AI Mode cited had changed by the next day, but the brand names in the answers were far more stable.[6] And earned and third-party sources still make up more than 84% of what AI cites, although journalism's share fell from 27% to 22% between May and September 2026.[3]
10. Be present where your buyers talk to each other
Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, forums and trade communities turn up a lot in AI answers, but not in every category. Check whether they appear for your market first. If they do, take part honestly under real names. Never astroturf; communities notice and it follows you.
11. Treat structured data as housekeeping, not a miracle
Schema markup for your organisation, people, articles and products is worth doing once, properly. But an Ahrefs study of 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD found no meaningful lift in AI citations.[4] The same goes for llms.txt files, which AI crawlers almost never request. Neither is worth paying extra for.
12. Say what you are, in your own words, more than once
If you're a law firm specialising in employment disputes, say so plainly on your homepage, your about page, your service pages and in your coverage. Repetition helps AI connect your name with your category.
What each tool seems to favour
These are working observations, not rules. The tools change often and say little about how they choose sources.
- ChatGPT mixes what it learned in training with live web searches. It leans on established publishers, reference sites and long-form journalism.
- Google AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in Google's index, but they now cite far beyond the top results. In early 2026 only about 38% of AI Overview citations ranked in the top ten.[5] Good SEO helps; it isn't the whole story. Ranking still helps you stay there: pages that rank in Google were about seven times more likely to stay cited for a week or more.[6]
- Gemini as a standalone app behaves somewhat differently to Gemini inside Google Search.
- Perplexity cites a lot of sources openly and leans towards fresh pages, listings and community sites.
- Claude tends towards well-edited journalism and reference material, and cites forums less readily.
They don't agree with each other much. AirOps found 68% of brand mentions appeared in only one AI tool.[1]
What nobody knows yet
We don't know exactly how each tool weighs its sources; the companies publish hints, not rules. We don't know how much AI agents, which browse and act on websites for people, will change things. And we don't know how long any of the specifics above will hold. Six months from now some of this will need a footnote.
Even from one day to the next: more than half the sources ChatGPT and AI Mode quote can change overnight, which is why a one-off check tells you very little. The best approach we have right now is thousands of searches run over about a week, to get a solid baseline, rather than tracking day to day.[6]
So my advice doesn't change much. Do these basics well. Then, before spending real money, find out who owns your corner of the market in AI answers and why. Be wary of anyone selling certainty.
Generic guide, specific problem
These twelve moves are the floor every brand should stand on. What you build on top depends on your market, your audience and what's actually being said about you. That's the part I help with. If you'd like a hand, tell me what's going on.
Sources
- AirOps, 2026 State of AI Search and The Complete AI Search Playbook for Marketers, 2026. See my notes on the AirOps numbers.
- Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, Princeton University and others, 2023. arxiv.org
- Muck Rack, What Is AI Reading?, October 2026 (40m+ AI responses and 207m citations in 2026, plus a September analysis of 1,020 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity). muckrack.com
- Ahrefs, schema and AI citations, May 2026. ahrefs.com
- Ahrefs, AI Overview citations and the top 10, March 2026. ahrefs.com
- Ahrefs, How stable are AI citations? 10 things we learned tracking 37,500 citations, October 2026. Same questions asked daily for 20 days on AI Mode, ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Gemini and Copilot. ahrefs.com
- Chen and Koudas, What Drives AI Citations? Content, Retrieval and Model Knowledge in Generative Engine Optimization, arXiv 2610.15033, October 2026 (158,099 AI answers). arxiv.org
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