How to get your business mentioned in ChatGPT (and other AI assistants)

"How do I get my business mentioned in ChatGPT?" is one of the fastest-growing questions in marketing. People ask it in dozens of ways: get cited, get featured, get listed, rank in ChatGPT. They all mean the same thing. When a potential customer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, you want to be in the reply.

There's no switch to flip and no way to buy your way into the answer. But there is a clear method, because AI assistants are predictable about what they rely on.

How AI assistants decide who to mention

When someone asks "what's the best payroll software for a 20-person company?", an assistant like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini does some mix of two things:

• It draws on what it learned in training: a broad picture of which brands are associated with which topics.
• It searches the web live and reads a handful of pages, then writes an answer and often cites them.

Either way, a brand gets mentioned when the model is confident about two things: what the brand is, and that others recommend it for this kind of question. Everything below improves one or both.

Step 1: Find the questions that matter

Write down 10 to 20 questions a real buyer would type before they know you exist. Not your brand name; the plain category question.

• "Best [your service] for [type of customer]"
• "[Your service] in [your town or region]"
• "[Competitor] alternatives"
• "How much does [your service] cost?"
• "Is [your type of product] worth it for [use case]?"

Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google. Record who gets named, in what order, and which websites are cited. This is your baseline, and it usually reveals a short list of sources that keep coming up.

Step 2: Make your business easy to understand

AI models connect information about a business from many places. If your website says "digital transformation partner", LinkedIn says "IT consultancy" and your directory listing says "software house", the model sees three fuzzy things instead of one clear one.

• Write one clear sentence: what you do, for whom, where. Use it on your homepage, About page, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile and every directory.
• Keep your name, address and contact details identical everywhere.
• Add structured data (Organization schema) to your site so machines can read the basics directly.
• Make sure your About page names your founders, your specialisms and your track record in plain words.

Step 3: Get named where AI already looks

This is usually the biggest lever. Look at the sources cited in Step 1. In most sectors you'll see the same types again and again:

• Review platforms such as Trustpilot, Google reviews, G2, Capterra or sector-specific sites.
• Comparison and "best of" articles on trusted publications and blogs.
• Industry directories and associations.
• Forums and communities such as Reddit or specialist groups.
• Press coverage and expert commentary.

Work through them deliberately: ask happy customers for reviews on the platforms that matter, pitch to the publications that write the comparison pieces, offer expert comment to journalists, and join real conversations where your expertise genuinely helps. Spammy forum posts tend to backfire; genuine, attributed expertise works.

Step 4: Publish pages that answer real questions

AI assistants quote content that answers a question cleanly. For each important buyer question, have a page where:

• The answer comes first, in one or two plain sentences.
• Specifics follow: prices or price ranges, timescales, who it suits and who it doesn't.
• Headings are written as the questions people ask.
• Claims are backed up with examples, case studies or data you can stand behind.

Pages that are honest about trade-offs ("we're not the right fit if...") tend to be trusted more by people and quoted more by machines.

Step 5: Check the technical basics

• Make sure AI crawlers aren't blocked in your robots.txt (look for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended) unless you've chosen to block them.
• Keep important content in plain HTML, not hidden behind scripts, tabs or logins.
• Keep pages fast and well structured, with a sitemap.

Step 6: Track it and keep going

AI answers change from week to week. Re-run your question list at least monthly and track:

• Share of answer: how often you're named across your questions.
• Citations: which of your pages, and which outside sources, get cited.
• Sentiment: whether you're recommended or just mentioned.
• AI referrals: visits and enquiries arriving from AI assistants.

This is the part most businesses drop, and it's why we give every client an AI Search agent that does the checking daily.

What doesn't work

• Stuffing pages with "ChatGPT" or "AI" keywords.
• Mass-produced AI content with nothing new in it.
• Fake reviews or sock-puppet forum posts. They're easy to spot and can damage how both people and models see you.
• Hidden text "for AI only". Models read what users read.

Questions people ask

Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT answers?

Not in the organic answer. Some AI platforms are testing ads, but these are labelled and separate from the recommendations the model writes. The way into the answer itself is being well understood and well regarded across the web.

How long does it take to get mentioned?

It varies. Assistants that search the web live, such as Perplexity and ChatGPT with search, can reflect new pages and coverage within weeks. Answers that rely on a model's training data change more slowly, often over months. Most businesses see the first movement within one to three months of consistent work.

Do AI assistants use Reddit and review sites?

Often, yes. AI answers regularly cite forums, review platforms, directories and comparison articles alongside brand websites. Which sources matter depends on your sector, which is why an audit starts by recording the sources cited for your questions.

Does ChatGPT use Google results?

ChatGPT's search feature uses its own search partners and crawlers rather than Google directly. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode do draw on Google's index. Either way, pages that are easy to crawl and clearly answer a question have the best chance of being read.

Can a small business compete with big brands?

Often more easily than in classic SEO. AI answers to specific questions, such as a niche, a location or a type of customer, frequently name smaller specialists, because they're the clearest match. Being precise about who you serve helps a lot.