Somewhere right now, a potential customer is typing “who should I hire for [the thing you do] in [your city]” into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. The assistant will answer with a handful of names. Either yours is one of them or it isn’t, and no one involved will ever tell you which.
The industry has already invented jargon for influencing this: GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization), and several other acronyms competing for the same conference slots. We’re going to skip the branding and just explain how it works and what to do, in order, for free. It’s less mysterious than the acronyms suggest, and most of it is work you can do yourself.
How an assistant picks who to mention
When you ask an AI assistant a question about the current world, it usually doesn’t answer purely from memory. It runs searches in the background, reads a set of pages, and assembles an answer from what it found, citing some of the sources. The trade calls this retrieval; you can think of it as a very fast research intern with no patience whatsoever.
That mental model tells you nearly everything about the strategy. To get mentioned, you need to be present and legible in the places the intern checks: your own site, and more importantly, the third-party sources the assistant trusts. And because the intern skims, the sources that get quoted are the ones where the answer could be lifted cleanly in a sentence or two.
Where the answers actually come from
This part has real data behind it. Semrush tracked citations across 230,000 prompts over 13 weeks and found Reddit and LinkedIn among the top five cited domains on ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, and Perplexity, with Wikipedia heavily cited on ChatGPT. A separate analysis of 30 million cited sources by Peec AI found Reddit the most-cited domain overall, with YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and Forbes rounding out the top five, and review platforms appearing constantly in recommendation-style queries. Profound’s analysis of 680 million citations shows each platform has its own taste: Perplexity leans hard on Reddit, ChatGPT on Wikipedia and editorial sources, Google’s AI products on their own ecosystem plus community content.
Three practical conclusions fall out of this research:
- Your website is necessary but not sufficient. Assistants triangulate. They check what independent sources say about you, because a business describing itself is not evidence.
- Community and review platforms punch far above their weight. A thread where a real person recommends you, or a review profile with substance, can outrank your beautifully designed homepage inside an AI answer.
- The patterns are volatile. Semrush watched Reddit’s share of ChatGPT citations collapse within two weeks in September 2025 when the model adjusted its sourcing. Whatever mix works today will drift. Build broadly; re-check quarterly.
Step 1: Become a consistent entity
Search systems, AI included, model your business as an entity: a thing with a name, a location, services, and relationships. Your first job is boring and foundational: make every description of your business agree with every other one.
- Same business name, same city, same one-line description of what you do, everywhere it appears: your site, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories, social bios, review platforms.
- Give your About page real substance. Who you are, what you do, who you do it for, where, and since when, stated plainly. About pages are weighed surprisingly heavily when systems assess who you are, and most businesses treat them as an afterthought with a stock photo.
- Say the quiet part on the page: “[Business] is a [category] in [city] that [does the thing] for [audience].” It feels robotic to write. It is, usefully, exactly what the robot needs.
If your business has naming inconsistencies floating around from an old rebrand or a lazy directory, fix those first. An assistant that isn’t sure you and “that other similarly named company” are the same entity will simply mention neither.
Step 2: Write pages a machine can quote
This is the same discipline we covered in our zero-click guide, so briefly:
- Headings phrased as the questions customers actually ask.
- A direct two-to-four sentence answer immediately under each heading, self-contained enough to be lifted whole.
- Plain language. Retrieval systems consistently favour clear declarative writing over marketing prose. “We reimagine synergistic brand futures” is not liftable; “we manage social media for small businesses in Toronto, starting at $3,000 a month” is.
- FAQ and LocalBusiness structured data so the meaning of the page is machine-readable.
- Real facts on the page: prices, timelines, service areas. Assistants prefer sources that commit to specifics.
Notice what’s missing: keyword stuffing, exotic tools, anything you’d need to buy. The craft is clarity.
Step 3: Build the third-party footprint
Since assistants trust what others say about you, your job is to give the others something to say. Ranked roughly by effort-to-payoff for a small business:
- Reviews, everywhere relevant. Google reviews first, then whichever platform your industry actually uses. Ask every happy customer. Respond to all of them, including the grumpy ones, because assistants read the responses too.
- A living LinkedIn presence. LinkedIn climbed into the top-cited sources across the major assistants, especially for professional and B2B queries. Substantive posts from a named human at your company, sharing genuine expertise, are citable in a way your company page boilerplate never will be.
- Honest community participation. When questions in your niche come up on Reddit or in industry forums, answer them properly, as yourself, disclosing who you are, linking only when your resource is genuinely the best answer. Highly upvoted, genuinely useful answers get retrieved. Astroturfing gets you banned and, worse, screenshotted.
- Earned mentions. A trade publication writing about your work, a local news feature, a podcast appearance with show notes. One independent article about you is worth a dozen self-descriptions, to humans and machines alike.
- Original data. Publish something factual that only you could publish, and other people cite it for you. This is the compounding asset in the whole playbook.
None of this is a trick, which is why it works. You are manufacturing the evidence trail of a business that is actually good, which is easiest to do by being one.
Step 4: Audit your AI reputation
You cannot manage what you’ve never looked at. Set aside thirty minutes and ask the major assistants (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude) the questions your customers would ask. For example:
- “What is [your business name]?” Check what it says for accuracy: services, location, pricing if mentioned.
- “Who are the best [your category] in [your city]?” See if you appear, and who does.
- “Is [your business] any good?” and “What are the alternatives to [your business]?” Note which sources it cites.
Record the answers in a spreadsheet with the date. When something is wrong, trace it: stale info usually comes from an outdated directory listing, an old page on your own site, or an abandoned profile. Fix the source and the answers follow, eventually. When something is missing, that’s your Step 3 to-do list telling you where the evidence gap is. Repeat quarterly, because as the Semrush data shows, the sourcing shifts under everyone’s feet.
What not to do
- Don’t buy reviews, seed fake Reddit accounts, or hire someone who promises “guaranteed AI rankings.” The platforms are actively tuning against manipulation, and the failure mode is public.
- Don’t mass-produce AI-written content to feed the AI. The systems increasingly downrank the beige, and your human readers already do. We keep a public policy on what we let AI do for exactly this reason.
- Don’t abandon the fundamentals. GEO is not a replacement for having a good business with visible proof; it is the practice of making that proof legible.
The short version, for the fridge
Be describable in one sentence, everywhere, identically. Answer real questions plainly on your own site. Give independent sources reasons and places to vouch for you. Check what the assistants say about you four times a year, and repair the sources of anything wrong. That’s the entire discipline; everything else is conference branding.