How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT, Gemini & Perplexity

Two years ago, "being found" meant ranking on the first page of Google. A customer typed a question, scanned ten blue links, and clicked one of yours. That entire motion is now being replaced. In March 2026, roughly 48% of Google searches showed an AI-generated answer at the very top of the page — up from about 34% in December 2025 — and a growing share of buyers never scroll past it. The question is no longer only "do I rank?" It is "am I inside the answer the machine reads aloud?"

This shift has a name — two names, actually. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is about getting a page selected, quoted, and cited inside an AI-generated answer. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the broader practice of making your content appear across generative engines — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. The acronyms overlap, and in May 2026 Google publicly argued they are really just "SEO done well." That is half right. The fundamentals of good SEO still matter. But the surface you are optimizing for has changed, and so have the tactics that move the needle.

Here is what actually works in 2026, in plain language.

Why this is urgent, not optional

The clearest signal comes from click behavior. An Ahrefs study of 300,000 keywords (December 2025) found that the click-through rate for the number-one organic result drops by about 58% when an AI Overview sits above it. In other words, for every 100 clicks a top-ranking page used to earn, the AI answer now keeps more than half. If your business depends on search traffic and you are not inside those answers, your visibility is quietly eroding even when your rankings look unchanged.

The flip side is the opportunity. Because AI engines synthesize answers from paragraphs rather than whole pages, you no longer have to outrank everyone to be quoted. Industry analysis in early 2026 found that roughly 68% of pages cited in Google's AI Mode sit outside the classic top 10 results. A single clear, well-evidenced paragraph can be lifted into an answer even when the article around it does not rank on page one. That is genuinely new — and it rewards clarity over brute-force authority.

1. Write in answers, not just articles

AI engines read your content looking for self-contained, citable claims. The structures that get quoted share a pattern:

Lead with the answer. Put a one- or two-sentence direct answer immediately under each heading, then expand. A short "TL;DR" or summary box near the top helps too.

Make every H2 a real question. Use a clean heading hierarchy (H1 → H2 → H3, no skipped levels) where each H2 is a standalone question a customer would actually ask, and the paragraph beneath it answers that question completely.

State claims plainly, then support them. "X reduces Y by Z, according to [source]" is far more citable than a vague, hedged sentence. AI systems prefer claims they can attribute with confidence.

2. Use FAQ schema — it is the single highest-impact move

Of all the structured-data types, FAQPage schema (JSON-LD) is the most valuable for AEO. It turns your question-answer pairs into machine-readable units, and each Q&A becomes an explicit citation candidate. If you do only one technical thing this quarter, add clean FAQ schema to your key pages. (Every article on this blog ships with it — the questions at the bottom of this page are marked up exactly this way.)

Pair it with the rest of the basics: Organization and Article/BlogPosting schema, visible author and publish/update dates, and an llms.txt file that points AI crawlers to your most important pages.

3. Be fresh, be specific, bring your own numbers

Two patterns repeat across the 2026 research. First, freshness wins: roughly half of AI-cited content is less than 13 weeks old, so a steady publishing and updating cadence matters more than a one-time content dump. Second, original data wins: pages that include their own statistics, benchmarks, or tables see meaningfully higher citation rates, because a verifiable number gives the engine something concrete to attribute. If you run audits, conversions, or migrations, your own anonymized results are a citation magnet competitors cannot copy.

4. Get indexed where each engine actually reads

Each engine has a plumbing layer worth knowing:

ChatGPT search runs on Bing. If you are not indexed in Bing, you cannot appear in ChatGPT's cited sources — so Bing Webmaster Tools is not optional. Expect a 4–8 week lag before new content surfaces in ChatGPT answers.

Perplexity and Gemini lean on their own crawls plus the open web and high-trust hubs.

Across every engine, a small set of domains punch above their weight. As of early 2026, Reddit was the single most-cited domain across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, with LinkedIn close behind (and #1 for professional queries), followed by YouTube, Wikipedia, and Forbes. A genuine presence on the ones that fit your business — a real LinkedIn footprint, helpful answers in the right communities — feeds the same engines that decide whether to cite you.

5. Measure what you cannot yet see

You cannot improve a citation you are not tracking. Build a list of your 20–30 most important customer questions and, on a regular cadence, run them through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude. Record where you are cited, where a competitor is cited instead, and where no one from your space appears at all. That last bucket — the unclaimed questions — is usually the fastest win. This manual sweep is tedious, but it is the only way to see the ground truth before the tooling in this space matures.

Where this leaves you

AEO and GEO are not a replacement for SEO; they are what SEO grew into once the answer moved to the top of the page. The work is concrete and mostly within reach: write in clear answers, mark them up with FAQ schema, publish fresh and specific content, get indexed where each engine reads, and measure your citations like you measure your rankings. Do that consistently and you stop competing for a click on a link — you start being the answer.

This is exactly the surface our SEO · GEO · AEO service is built for: structured data and llms.txt, AI-visibility audits across ChatGPT/Gemini/Perplexity/Copilot/AI Overviews, and the Core Web Vitals work that keeps you eligible in the first place.