[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":222},["ShallowReactive",2],{"blog-how-to-get-your-business-cited-by-chatgpt":3},{"id":4,"title":5,"body":6,"category":211,"categoryValue":212,"date":213,"description":214,"extension":215,"meta":216,"navigation":217,"path":218,"seo":219,"stem":220,"__hash__":221},"blog/blog/how-to-get-your-business-cited-by-chatgpt.md","How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT and Other AI Engines",{"type":7,"value":8,"toc":197},"minimark",[9,13,16,21,24,32,36,39,42,46,49,52,56,65,68,72,75,78,82,98,105,109,112,146,150,165,169,172,176,179],[10,11,12],"p",{},"To get your business cited by ChatGPT and other AI engines, you need to make your business easy to retrieve, easy to verify, and easy to quote: clear entity information and structured data on your site, a presence in the third-party sources AI engines trust (reviews, directories, roundups), and content that answers real customer questions in extractable form.",[10,14,15],{},"That's the whole strategy in one sentence. Here's the playbook, step by step.",[17,18,20],"h2",{"id":19},"first-understand-how-citations-happen","First, Understand How Citations Happen",[10,22,23],{},"AI engines don't \"know\" your business the way they know historical facts. When someone asks for a recommendation, the engine retrieves live or recently-indexed information — from its search partners, from crawled pages, from data sources it trusts — and synthesizes an answer from what it finds. Getting cited means winning that retrieval-and-synthesis process.",[10,25,26,27,31],{},"That has an important implication: ",[28,29,30],"strong",{},"most of what earns AI citations is verifiable, structural work — not tricks."," There's no secret handshake. There's a stack of signals, and most businesses have built almost none of them.",[17,33,35],{"id":34},"step-1-fix-your-entity-story","Step 1: Fix Your Entity Story",[10,37,38],{},"An \"entity,\" in search terms, is the machine's concept of who you are. Before any AI engine recommends you, it needs to resolve, with confidence: your name, what you do, who you serve, and where you operate.",[10,40,41],{},"Audit every place your business is described — your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories, social profiles. The description should agree everywhere, down to phrasing of what you do. Every conflict (an old service list, a stale location, two different company descriptions) erodes machine confidence, and low-confidence entities don't get recommended.",[17,43,45],{"id":44},"step-2-ship-structured-data","Step 2: Ship Structured Data",[10,47,48],{},"JSON-LD schema markup is how you state facts about your business in the format AI systems parse natively. At minimum: Organization schema site-wide, Service schema on every service page, FAQPage schema on your FAQs, and Article schema on your posts. LocalBusiness schema if you serve a geographic market.",[10,50,51],{},"This is the single highest-leverage technical step, and most small-business websites have essentially none of it. If you want to see what full coverage looks like, view the source of any page on this site — we publish everything we recommend.",[17,53,55],{"id":54},"step-3-publish-a-machine-readable-summary","Step 3: Publish a Machine-Readable Summary",[10,57,58,59,64],{},"llms.txt is an emerging standard: a plain-text file at yoursite.com/llms.txt that gives AI crawlers a clean summary of your business — who you are, what you offer, how to reach you — without making them parse your whole site. It costs almost nothing to create, and adoption is still early enough that having one is a real differentiator. (",[60,61,63],"a",{"href":62},"/llms.txt","Ours is live"," if you want a template to study.)",[10,66,67],{},"While you're at it: check your robots.txt. Many sites block GPTBot, Claude-Web, and other AI crawlers by default — then wonder why AI engines never mention them. Being cited starts with being readable.",[17,69,71],{"id":70},"step-4-build-the-review-footprint-ai-actually-reads","Step 4: Build the Review Footprint AI Actually Reads",[10,73,74],{},"When an AI engine answers \"who's the best X near me,\" it leans heavily on review corpora: Google Business Profile above all, plus the platforms relevant to your industry. A business with a thin, stale, or absent review presence is nearly invisible to recommendation queries no matter how good its website is.",[10,76,77],{},"The work here is unglamorous and compounding: claim and complete your profiles, ask happy customers for reviews consistently, and respond to what comes in. Volume, recency, and specificity all matter.",[17,79,81],{"id":80},"step-5-get-into-the-sources-ai-trusts","Step 5: Get Into the Sources AI Trusts",[10,83,84,85,89,90,94,95,97],{},"Ask an AI engine for \"the best ",[86,87,88],"span",{},"anything","\" and watch what it cites: roundup articles, directories, industry lists. AI engines answer superlative questions by aggregating sources that have already done the ranking. If you're not ",[91,92,93],"em",{},"in"," those sources, you can't be ",[91,96,93],{}," the answer.",[10,99,100,101,104],{},"That makes old-fashioned digital PR newly valuable: industry directories, local business lists, \"best of\" roundups, guest contributions. Target the specific pages that already rank for \"best ",[86,102,103],{},"your category","\" — those exact pages are what the AI reads.",[17,106,108],{"id":107},"step-6-write-content-ai-can-quote","Step 6: Write Content AI Can Quote",[10,110,111],{},"AI engines extract; they don't summarize whole essays. Content earns citations when the answer is sitting right there in liftable form:",[113,114,115,122,128,134,140],"ul",{},[116,117,118,121],"li",{},[28,119,120],{},"Lead with the answer."," First sentence, direct definition or direct answer — then elaborate.",[116,123,124,127],{},[28,125,126],{},"Use question-shaped headings"," that match how people actually phrase things to AI.",[116,129,130,133],{},[28,131,132],{},"Use \"X is Y\" definition patterns"," for anything you want to be the authority on.",[116,135,136,139],{},[28,137,138],{},"Add FAQ sections with FAQPage schema"," — heavily retrieved by AI systems.",[116,141,142,145],{},[28,143,144],{},"Publish specifics"," — numbers, steps, honest cost ranges. Vague content gets skipped; concrete content gets quoted.",[17,147,149],{"id":148},"step-7-measure-then-repeat","Step 7: Measure, Then Repeat",[10,151,152,153,156,157,160,161,164],{},"Test the prompts your customers would actually use — \"best ",[86,154,155],{},"service"," in ",[86,158,159],{},"city",",\" \"should I hire X or do Y myself,\" \"",[86,162,163],{},"your name"," reviews\" — across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI results. Record who appears. Re-test monthly; AI answers shift as models and sources update, and the feedback loop tells you which work is landing.",[17,166,168],{"id":167},"how-long-does-this-take","How Long Does This Take?",[10,170,171],{},"Faster than traditional SEO in some respects: AI retrieval sources refresh quickly, and fixing a broken entity signal or missing schema can show up in weeks. Authority and review depth compound over months. The pattern we see: structural fixes move the needle first, content and reputation lock in the position.",[17,173,175],{"id":174},"the-short-version","The Short Version",[10,177,178],{},"Make yourself readable (schema, llms.txt, open robots). Make yourself verifiable (consistent entity, reviews, trusted third-party sources). Make yourself quotable (answer-first content). Then measure and iterate.",[10,180,181,182,186,187,191,192,196],{},"If you'd rather start with a map than a checklist, that's exactly what our ",[60,183,185],{"href":184},"/ai-visibility-report","free AI Visibility Report"," is: real prompts across the major engines, a structured-data and entity audit, and a prioritized fix list for your specific business. And if you want the whole discipline handled for you, that's our ",[60,188,190],{"href":189},"/services/ai/search-visibility","AI Search Visibility service"," — built by people who ",[60,193,195],{"href":194},"/services/ai/custom-apps","build AI systems"," for a living.",{"title":198,"searchDepth":199,"depth":199,"links":200},"",2,[201,202,203,204,205,206,207,208,209,210],{"id":19,"depth":199,"text":20},{"id":34,"depth":199,"text":35},{"id":44,"depth":199,"text":45},{"id":54,"depth":199,"text":55},{"id":70,"depth":199,"text":71},{"id":80,"depth":199,"text":81},{"id":107,"depth":199,"text":108},{"id":148,"depth":199,"text":149},{"id":167,"depth":199,"text":168},{"id":174,"depth":199,"text":175},"Marketing Strategy","marketing","2026-08-23","A practical, step-by-step playbook for getting ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews to mention and recommend your business — from structured data to reviews to the content formats AI actually quotes.","md",{},true,"/blog/how-to-get-your-business-cited-by-chatgpt",{"title":5,"description":214},"blog/how-to-get-your-business-cited-by-chatgpt","TNK9T76jElvmsu1RBUIfspIQYXSSbshO99BhixV5Ilg",1787490302781]