You can buy an ad next to an AI answer now. OpenAI started testing ads in ChatGPT in the US in February 2026, and said in the same breath that ads do not influence the answers. So the answer itself isn't for sale, and keyword stuffing won't get you into it. Generative engines cite sources they can find and cleanly extract. This playbook is how you become one.
The direct answer: to get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, you need five things. A consistent description of who you are. Pages that lead with plain, self-contained answers. Mentions in the places these tools read. Structured data. Facts that stay current. That's generative engine optimisation, or GEO. There's no trick in it, and the work compounds.
What GEO is, and why it's different from SEO
Classic SEO was about ranking a page in a list of ten blue links. The searcher clicked, landed on your site and made up their own mind. GEO is about being the source an AI system draws from when it writes a single answer. There's no list to climb. You're named in the answer or you're absent.
That changes what "good content" means. A search engine could rank a long, meandering page because the searcher would scroll to the bit they needed. A language model building an answer wants a clean, confident statement it can lift and attribute. It also has the rest of the web to compare you against. In our view, a website that says one thing while your directory listings say another gives the model a reason to hedge, and hedging tends to leave you out.
SEO still matters, a lot. Google's AI Overviews can run related searches behind the scenes to build a response, and ChatGPT's search features surface websites through a crawler called OAI-SearchBot. Block that crawler in robots.txt, or be invisible in ordinary search, and you're out before you start. GEO adds new requirements on top. If the alphabet soup is confusing, our plain-English guide to AEO, GEO and SEO sorts out which is which.
1. Nail down your entity
Before AI can recommend you, it has to understand what you are. Describe your business and its category the same clear way everywhere online.
In practice, write one "entity statement" and reuse it. For example: "[Business name] is a [category] in [location] that helps [who] with [what], known for [differentiator]." Then get that description, word for word where possible, onto:
- The homepage and About page of your site
- Google Business Profile
- Your LinkedIn company page and founder profiles
- Industry directories and association listings
- Podcast and speaker bios, plus guest post author boxes
We go deeper on this in how to become an entity AI trusts.
2. Publish extractable, quotable content
Models lift clean, self-contained statements. Lead every page with a direct answer, then pack in numbers and steps a machine can quote without the surrounding paragraph. In the Princeton and IIT Delhi study that named GEO, adding statistics, quotations and cited sources lifted a page's visibility in generated answers by 30 to 40%. Keyword stuffing did little or nothing.
Try a quick test. Paste any paragraph from your site into a blank document. If it still answers a question without leaning on "as mentioned above", it's quotable.
The patterns worth building into every page:
- Question-shaped headings followed immediately by a one or two sentence answer.
- Definitions that start with "X is..." and finish in a single sentence.
- Numbered steps for anything procedural.
- Comparisons that spell out the difference between two options in plain terms.
- Specifics you own, like your pricing ranges and turnaround times, stated on the page and not hidden behind "contact us."
For three concrete rewrites you can make to existing pages, read three edits that get your business quoted by ChatGPT.
3. Earn mentions where AI reads
Generative engines pull from the wider web, well beyond your site. Semrush tracked more than 100 million citations across ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode and Perplexity over 13 weeks in 2025 and found Reddit and Wikipedia in the leading positions, with YouTube among the fastest climbers on AI Mode. Being talked about in those places is often worth more than another blog post on your own domain.
On your website you control the message. In the AI answer, the web's consensus about you is the message. Go shape it.
Shaping consensus doesn't mean astroturfing. Planted forum posts get spotted, and the ACCC is blunt about fake reviews: it is against the law for a business to create them or arrange for others to. The legitimate version is the unglamorous work of showing up:
- Build a steady flow of reviews from real customers on the platforms that matter in your industry, and reply to them. We explain why in AI reads your reviews before it recommends you.
- Pitch yourself for "best of" roundups and comparison articles in your niche. When someone asks "who's the best X for Y?", a roundup is the obvious page for an AI tool to consult.
- Answer questions in public on Reddit and industry forums, as yourself, with no hard sell.
- Publish on YouTube. Explain what you know on camera, with a clear title and description.
- Get quoted in trade publications and local media under your own name.
4. Mark everything up
Schema turns your pages into structured facts about your organisation and what it sells. Google says it uses structured data to understand the content of a page. It also says there is no special schema you need to add to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Treat markup as a way to remove doubt about your facts, and nothing more.
The minimum set for most businesses:
- Organization or LocalBusiness schema on your homepage, with your name and contact details, plus links to your official profiles.
- Service or Product schema on each service or product page, describing what it is and who it's for.
- FAQPage schema on pages with an FAQ section that visitors can see. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026, so don't expect a bigger listing from it.
- Article and author markup on blog posts, connecting each piece to a named person and their credentials.
- Review markup only where it's allowed. Google won't show star ratings for reviews a business controls about itself, which rules out testimonials marked up on your own LocalBusiness page.
Then test it. Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator will tell you whether the markup reads correctly.
5. Stay fresh and consistent
- Update your cornerstone content so the prices, examples and dates on it are this year's.
- Keep your facts identical across every profile and mention.
- Feed the engines proof. Named results and credentials give the AI something favourable to repeat.
Put a date in the calendar every quarter to review your ten most important pages. Change the "last updated" date only when you've made a real edit, and check every external profile still matches. When your pricing, address or service list changes, change it everywhere on the same day.
How to tell if GEO is working
You can't open a dashboard and see your "AI ranking." You can still measure it well enough to make decisions.
- Run a monthly prompt check. Write down ten questions your ideal customer would ask an AI tool, like "best [service] in [city] for [situation]." Ask them in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity each month. Record whether you're mentioned and which sources get cited.
- Watch referral traffic from AI tools. In GA4, look for chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai as referral sources and segment them on their own. Read the number as a minimum, because some AI visits land under Direct.
- Ask new leads how they found you. Add "AI assistant (ChatGPT etc.)" as an option on your enquiry form.
- Track which sources get cited for your category. If one directory or publication keeps showing up, get listed there.
A worked example: the physio clinic
Say you run a physiotherapy clinic in Perth. You ask ChatGPT "best physio in Perth for running injuries" and you're not mentioned. Two competitors are, and the answer cites a local "best of" article and a Reddit thread.
A 90-day plan built on the playbook could run like this.
Month one: write your entity statement ("a Perth physiotherapy clinic specialising in running and sports injuries") and push it across your site and your Google Business Profile. Rewrite your running injuries page to open with a direct answer, list the conditions you treat, explain your process step by step and add an FAQ with schema.
Month two: set up a simple review request after a patient's final session, asking them to mention what they came in for. Email the author of that local roundup with a short, useful pitch.
Month three: record five short videos answering common runner questions and publish them with clear titles.
Then rerun the prompt check. You might not be in the answer yet. But you've given every AI tool consistent, quotable reasons to include you, and that's the part you control. (This scenario is hypothetical, but the steps are exactly what we'd prioritise.)
Where to start this week
Don't try to do all five at once. Write your entity statement, fix any contradictions across your top five profiles, and rewrite the opening of your most important service page so it answers the core question in two sentences.
Three mistakes waste the most time. Don't churn out dozens of thin AI-written posts and hope volume gets you noticed. Don't hide key facts in PDFs or behind forms, where they're hard to read. And don't chase one tool's quirks. In that same Semrush study, Reddit went from being cited in close to 60% of ChatGPT responses in early August to around 10% by mid-September. Build for clarity and consensus instead.
Do this consistently and you stop hoping the AI mentions you. You engineer it. At LIQID NOISE, this is a core part of our digital marketing work: SEO and AI search visibility built together, so you show up whether your customer types into Google or asks a chatbot.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?
Make your business easy to understand and easy to quote. Describe what you do the same way on your website and every profile. Open your pages with direct answers, and earn reviews and mentions on third-party sites. You can pay for an ad beside a ChatGPT answer, but OpenAI says ads don't influence the answer itself.
Is GEO replacing SEO?
No. GEO builds on SEO. Google's AI features run ordinary searches to find their sources, so technical SEO and authority still matter. GEO adds priorities on top: quotable answers, consistent entity information and a presence on the review platforms and forums AI systems cite.
How long does it take to show up in AI answers?
There's no fixed timeline, because each AI tool updates its sources differently. Fixes to your pages and profiles can be picked up fairly quickly by tools that search the live web. Building reviews and mentions takes months of steady work. Treat it like SEO: a compounding investment, measured with a monthly prompt check.
Does schema markup help with AI search?
Schema markup helps by turning your key facts into structured data, which makes your business easier to understand and harder to misread. It won't guarantee citations, and Google says no special schema is required to appear in its AI features. It works best when the visible page says the same thing as the markup.