Getting your business cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity
How AI assistants choose which websites to quote, why a small business can be chosen over a bigger one, and the changes to make on your own site first.
More buyers now ask an assistant before they search. They type a whole question into ChatGPT or Perplexity, read a written answer, and click one or two of the sources it names. Being one of those sources is a different job from ranking first on Google, and a small business with a clear, honest page can win it against a much bigger one.
How do ChatGPT and Perplexity choose what to cite?
When either assistant answers a question that needs current information, it runs its own searches in the background, often several related ones, reads the pages it finds and writes an answer from them. Perplexity shows its sources for nearly every answer. ChatGPT shows them when it searches. Both prefer passages they can lift cleanly: a paragraph that answers the question on its own, a table that compares options, a list of steps. Both lean on pages that are recent, signed by a real author and consistent with what other sites say about the same subject.
That last point matters most for a small business. An assistant is reluctant to state a fact about you that only you have published. When your name, address, services and prices say the same thing on your site, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings and other people's articles, the assistant can repeat them with confidence.
What should you change on your own site first?
- Check your robots file allows the assistants' crawlers: OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot for OpenAI, PerplexityBot for Perplexity. Many sites block them by accident through a security setting.
- Open every important page with a short, direct answer to the question it targets, before any story or sales copy.
- Use headings written as the questions people actually ask.
- Put the author's name and the date published or updated on the page, not only in the code.
- Publish the facts an assistant would need to recommend you: what you do, where, for whom, and what it costs.
- Add structured data that describes your business and your articles, so machines read the same facts people do.
This site is built on those rules. Every piece in our journal opens with a boxed short version, carries question headings and a dated byline, and the studio publishes a plain-text summary of itself for assistants at /llms.txt. Our prices are on /pricing as text, not hidden behind a form, because an assistant cannot recommend what it cannot read.
What does a citable page look like?
| Gets cited | Gets skipped |
|---|---|
| Answers the question in the first paragraph | Opens with a long story or a sales pitch |
| States facts plainly, with the source named | Makes claims with no source and no date |
| Compares options in a table | Buries the comparison in long paragraphs |
| Signed by a named person, with a date | Anonymous and undated |
| Admits when another option is better | Recommends itself for everything |
The last row is worth dwelling on. Assistants are asked comparison questions constantly, and a page that only ever recommends its own author reads as an advertisement. A page that says plainly when the reader should choose someone else reads as advice, and advice is what gets quoted. Every article we publish has a section on when hiring us is the wrong call for exactly that reason, and because it is true.
Why do other sites matter so much?
Because assistants draw a large share of their answers from places other than a business's own site: review platforms, directories, industry publications, forum threads and video descriptions. A mention of your business in a trade publication, an honest review on a directory such as Clutch, or a useful answer you wrote in a community forum each gives an assistant a second source that agrees with the first.
How do you keep your facts consistent?
Write them down once, in one place, and copy from there every time. The list is short: your business name exactly as you want it said, your address, your phone number, what you do in one sentence, where you work, who runs the business, and what it costs. Then check each place your business appears against it: your site, your Google Business Profile, directory listings, social profiles and any article that mentions you.
Small differences matter more than they look. A different legal form, an old address or a service you no longer offer gives an assistant two versions of the truth, and it may pick the wrong one or neither. We learned this ourselves: for a time our site described the studio as an American company, which it is not. Drifted is a sole proprietorship in Pakistan, and the site now says so in every place a machine reads it, with a test that fails if the wrong wording ever returns.
When is this not worth doing yet?
If your site is not yet found on Google at all, start there. Assistants that search the web use search indexes, so a page Google and Bing cannot find is a page no assistant will cite. Our comparison of search, answer-engine and generative search work at /compare/seo-vs-aeo-vs-geo explains the order to do things in, and our earlier piece at /blog/how-to-get-your-brand-cited-by-ai-search goes deeper on brand mentions. When the basics are done and you still are not named, our AI search work is at /services/ai-search.
Questions we get asked
No. There is no paid placement in the sources these assistants cite. Anyone selling guaranteed citations is selling something they do not control.
Yes. Pages that rank well are more likely to be found when an assistant searches, though a clear, well-structured page can be cited without ranking first.
Ask it the questions your buyers ask, several times each, and note whether you appear. Answers vary between runs, so look for a pattern, not a single result.
It is not required by any assistant, and Google says it does not use it. It is cheap to add, and some tools do read it, so we publish one.