How to get your company cited by ChatGPT and AI search

To get your company cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews, publish pages that answer specific questions in their opening lines, make sure the crawlers these products use can reach and read them, and describe your company the same way everywhere it appears. Nobody can guarantee a citation, and anyone who promises one is guessing. What you can do is make your site the easiest credible source to quote.

How well that works depends on the question. Answer engines draw on whatever they judge most relevant and trustworthy for a given prompt, the sources differ between products, and they change over time. A useful place to start is the narrow question your team can answer from direct experience. That gives readers a reason to trust the page and gives you something more useful to publish than another broad category overview.

1. How do AI search engines find your pages?

The products work differently and publish only part of how they work, so treat anything more precise than this outline with suspicion.

• Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google’s search index, so a page has to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet in ordinary results before it can appear as a link.
• OpenAI documents OAI-SearchBot as its crawler for surfacing websites in ChatGPT search.
• Perplexity documents PerplexityBot as a crawler used to surface and link websites in search results.
• An answer produced without web retrieval is a different measurement from a live search citation. Record which mode you tested before comparing results.

The common thread is that live answers are assembled from search results. Start with ordinary search hygiene. It makes the pages accessible, even though it cannot guarantee that an answer engine will choose them.

Your robots.txt and your CDN

Each AI company publishes the user agents its crawlers use. OpenAI separates GPTBot, which collects training data, from OAI-SearchBot, which serves search, so you can opt out of one without the other. Check each provider’s current documentation rather than assuming all bots serve the same purpose. Review robots.txt alongside your CDN and hosting firewall: permission in one place does not prove the request gets through everywhere.

Content that exists without JavaScript

Check what your server returns before assuming every crawler sees what a browser shows. If your core copy appears only after scripts run, inspect whether the systems you care about can retrieve it. Server-rendered or static HTML makes important text available without that dependency. Keep useful diagrams and video too, with a written explanation beside them.

Indexing in Google and Bing

Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit a sitemap to both, and investigate important pages they report as excluded. Not every exclusion is an error: redirects, duplicates and private pages may be excluded deliberately. A page that isn’t in the index can’t be cited from it.

2. What does an answer-first page look like?

A clear answer directly under its question is useful to a reader who arrives halfway down the page. It also gives a search system a passage that can be understood outside the surrounding article. Treat that as good editorial practice, not a published ranking formula.

• Put the question people actually ask in the heading, in their words rather than your product vocabulary.
• Answer it in the first two or three sentences, then give the conditions and exceptions.
• Give each page one coherent job. Keep related questions together where that helps the reader; do not split one useful guide into thin pages just to target more queries.
• State facts precisely: what the product does, who it’s for, where you operate, and what it costs if you publish prices.
• Keep pages current and dated, because a stale specification gets quoted as if it were true today.

Write the answer so it still makes sense outside the page around it.

For technical companies this is often the biggest gap. The homepage says something evocative, the documentation is precise but written for existing users, and nothing in between answers the question a buyer types into an assistant. It’s why Refract reads a site the way a buyer reads it before suggesting a single fix.

3. Do FAQ schema and llms.txt help?

Structured data

Schema.org markup describes content in a machine-readable form. Use the types that match the page, such as Organization, BlogPosting and BreadcrumbList, and make sure they agree with the visible text. Google retired FAQ rich results in May 2026. FAQPage remains a schema.org type, but it does not earn that Google search display or guarantee an AI citation. A useful question-and-answer section earns its place by helping the reader.

llms.txt

An llms.txt file can provide a short description of your site and links to useful pages. Google says it does not affect visibility or rankings in Google Search. Treat it as an optional directory for systems that choose to read it, and keep it accurate if you maintain one. It cannot replace crawl access, useful content or an accessible website. At Refract we maintain one as a directory; we do not sell it as a route to guaranteed citations.

4. Why does it matter what other sites say about you?

Look at the sources cited for questions your buyers actually ask. They may include vendors, documentation, reviews, forums and industry publications. That sample shows where the answer came from in that session; it does not establish a universal formula for earning mentions.

So make the description of your company consistent everywhere it appears. Use the same name, the same one-line description and the same category on your site, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, GitHub, app marketplaces, review platforms and industry directories, and link them to each other. When descriptions disagree, it is harder for any system, or any person, to tell that they all refer to the same company.

Then earn mentions the slow way: useful writing that others link to, talks and podcasts, customer stories published by the customer, and accurate entries in the directories your buyers use. Choose places that are relevant to your buyers, and describe your work accurately. A directory full of unsupported superlatives repeats the problem on another domain.

5. How do you know if it’s working?

Imperfectly, for now. There is no single ranking report that covers every assistant, and answers vary between users, sessions and days. Combine a few rough signals.

• Watch referral traffic in your analytics from domains such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and copilot.microsoft.com.
• Keep a fixed list of the questions buyers ask, run them through each assistant every month, and record whether you are mentioned, cited and described accurately.
• Check Google Search Console, which counts appearances in Google’s AI features within its normal search performance data.
• Ask new leads how they found you, and include AI assistants as an option on the form.

Accuracy matters as much as frequency. If an assistant describes your product wrongly, inspect the sources it cites and the pages you control. Correct outdated information where you find it, but do not assume that every error has a visible source or that one edit will immediately change the answer.

6. How does Refract approach AI search?

We treat AI search as part of marketing and growth work, alongside the website, SEO and content, because the same pages have to serve a buyer, a search engine and an assistant at once. The entry point is a growth audit: how people find you, what they read when they land, and where they leave.

We look at every route in, from search and AI answers to social and referrals, then read the site the way a buyer reads it. The fixes come back ranked by effort and effect, with the first ones drafted, alongside a search and content plan for what follows. That plan covers the unglamorous work in this post: crawl access, answer-first pages, consistent descriptions and structured data.

We won’t promise you a citation, because nobody can. Projects start at A$15k and scale to A$100k+, depending on what you need, with the scope fixed and the price agreed before work starts. Whatever we write or build is yours.

7. Questions

Is GEO different from SEO?

The work overlaps: accessible pages, useful information and credible sources matter to both. GEO usually describes visibility in generated answers. It does not come with a separate, guaranteed ranking recipe.

What is the difference between AEO and GEO?

AEO generally refers to making content useful for direct answers, including search features and assistants. GEO focuses on generated responses. The labels overlap; ask a provider which concrete work and measurements they mean.

Should I block GPTBot in robots.txt?

Blocking GPTBot affects whether OpenAI can use your pages for training. ChatGPT search relies on a separate crawler, OAI-SearchBot, so you can block one and allow the other.

How long does it take to appear in AI answers?

There is no fixed timeline. Crawling, indexing and source selection all vary by service. A page being accessible or indexed does not prove it will be selected for an answer.

Does adding llms.txt get a site cited by AI?

It does not guarantee citations. Google says llms.txt does not affect Google Search visibility or rankings. Maintain it only as a useful, accurate directory for systems that choose to read it.

Should we publish a separate page for every AI question?

No. Group related questions into a useful page when they serve the same reader and task. Separate pages make sense when each has a distinct purpose and enough original information to support it.