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How to Get Mentioned on AI: 11 Things I Would Do First

I spent months testing what actually gets a brand named inside ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity answers. Here is the checklist I use now, backed by data.

By Marcus Reid
How to Get Mentioned on AI: 11 Things I Would Do First

Last spring I did something that ruined my week. I opened ChatGPT and typed the exact question my best customer had asked me six months earlier. The answer came back clean, confident, and four paragraphs long. It named three competitors. It did not name us.

That is the whole problem in one sentence. We were ranking on page one of Google for the same query. It did not matter. The buyer never saw page one.

If you are reading this, you probably want the same thing I wanted: to be the name the machine says out loud. So here is the list, in the order I would work through it.

1. Accept that this is a different game than SEO

The overlap between Google's top ten organic results and the sources AI engines actually cite has collapsed. Research summarized by LLMrefs puts the drop at roughly 70 percent down to under 20 percent, and BrightEdge data cited by AI Thinker Lab lands in a similar 17 to 38 percent range for early 2026.

That said, do not burn your SEO program down. Jeremy Moser, CEO of uSERP, puts it bluntly: "80% of GEO is good, fundamental SEO." Google's own 2026 guidance says optimizing for its AI features is still SEO. Think of this as a layer on top, not a replacement.

2. Understand exactly how small the door is

Here is the number that made me stop procrastinating. SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index looked at more than 350,000 business locations and found that only 1.2 percent were recommended by ChatGPT, against 35.9 percent appearing in Google's local three-pack.

So 98.8 percent of local businesses are invisible to AI. That sounds like bad news. I read it as the opposite. Almost nobody in your category has started, which means the cost of entry is still low.

The demand side is moving much faster than the supply side. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 45 percent of US consumers used ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to find a local business in the past year, up from just 6 percent the year before. I have not seen a consumer behavior shift move that fast in my career.

3. Check that the AI crawlers can even reach you

This is the least glamorous item on the list and the one I find broken most often. Open your robots.txt file and confirm you are not blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, or PerplexityBot.

If you sit behind Cloudflare, check twice. Cloudflare changed its default configuration to block AI bots, which means some sites shut off their AI traffic without anyone touching a setting. I have watched a client spend three months on content while their server quietly turned every crawler away at the door.

4. Front-load the answer, then structure for extraction

Retrieval systems do not read your article. They chunk it, embed it, and pull the passage that best matches a query. That changes what a good page looks like.

Kevin Indig's research at Growth Memo found that 44.2 percent of LLM citations come from the first 30 percent of an article. AI reads like an impatient editor. Put the direct answer in the opening lines, use question-style headings, and write self-contained sections that make sense when lifted out of context.

I now write every important page with one rule in mind: if a machine copied any single paragraph and pasted it into an answer, would it still be accurate and still name us?

5. Add statistics, citations, and quotes on purpose

This one has actual peer-reviewed evidence behind it, which is rare in this field. The foundational paper, "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan, and Deshpande (Princeton, Georgia Tech, IIT Delhi, and the Allen Institute for AI, presented at KDD 2024), tested nine content tactics across roughly 10,000 queries.

The authors reported that "Including citations, quotations from relevant sources, and statistics can significantly boost source visibility" by more than 40 percent.

Three tactics won: Cite Sources, Quotation Addition, and Statistics Addition, each producing 30 to 40 percent relative gains on the study's position-adjusted word count metric. Four tactics did nothing or made things worse, including keyword stuffing and generic persuasive language.

The finding I care about most is buried in the details: lower-ranked sites benefit far more from these techniques than top-ranked ones. If you are the small player, this research was practically written for you.

6. Build your footprint off your own website

I resisted this for a long time because I wanted our blog to be the answer. It is not.

Omniscient Digital analyzed more than 23,000 citations and found that roughly 77 percent of the sources cited on branded queries were off-page, things like directories, review platforms, forums, and video. Only about 23 percent came from the brand's own content.

Kevin Indig makes the same case about owned media, arguing that "it's a crucial input, but it's likely one of the weakest" compared with what publications, analysts, and communities say about you.

The practical version: get listed, get reviewed, get mentioned in roundups, get discussed in communities. Among ChatGPT's most frequent sources for business recommendations, Wikipedia accounts for 47.9 percent of mentions, Reddit for 11.3 percent, and Forbes for 6.8 percent, per Search Engine Land. For Google AI Overviews, Reddit holds around 21 percent of citations and YouTube around 18.8 percent.

7. Fix your name, address, and phone number everywhere

Boring, and it works. SOCi's 2026 data puts business profile accuracy at just 68 percent across AI platforms.

AI models cross-reference your Google Business Profile against Yelp, Bing Places, BBB, and Foursquare. When those records disagree, the model's confidence in recommending you drops, and it hedges by naming someone else. For local queries specifically, one study of 28 million AI responses found Yelp alone received 512,680 citations in Q4 2025, 3.4 times more than the next platform.

8. Chase corroboration, not volume

If only your website says you are the best option, an AI treats that as marketing copy. If G2, two Reddit threads, a YouTube review, and a local news feature all say something similar, that is corroboration, and the model commits.

Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands found brand mentions correlate with AI Overview visibility at 0.664, against 0.218 for backlinks. That single comparison should redirect a chunk of your budget from link building toward digital PR.

Aleyda Solís, founder of Orainti, frames the goal well: "AI brand visibility should be built on durable authority." Lily Ray of Amsive makes a related point in the same report, arguing that mentions and influence inside generative AI now deserve more attention than referral clicks.

9. Keep it fresh, because freshness is measurable

Ahrefs analyzed 17 million citations and found that AI-cited content is 25.7 percent fresher on average than content ranking in classic Google organic results, with ChatGPT showing the strongest recency preference.

Freshness means the substance changed, not the date stamp. I update our core pages quarterly with new numbers, new examples, and new customer language.

10. Measure the description, not just the mention

Ask the same question twice and you will get two different answers. These systems are probabilistic, so a single spot-check tells you nothing.

Run a fixed list of prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity every week, and log four things: were you mentioned, in what position, was the description accurate, and did the answer give the reader a next step. An answer that name-drops you but sends the buyer to a competitor's booking page is a loss, not a win.

Worth knowing: ChatGPT cites only about 15 percent of the pages it retrieves while researching an answer. The other 85 percent get evaluated and dropped. Being retrieved is not the same as being cited.

11. Decide whether to run this in-house or with help

You can absolutely start alone. Items 3, 4, 7, and 10 on this list are free and you could finish them this week.

What is hard to sustain solo is the distribution footprint and the monthly refresh discipline while indexes catch up. This is where a specialist partner earns its keep. Annapurna Influence is built for exactly this problem, and it is genuinely useful for small businesses that do not have a marketing department. They produce structured, citation-ready content, push it to publisher and social surfaces the retrieval layers already index, and track how each engine describes you across your target prompts rather than just whether you got mentioned. They also offer a free AI visibility report that runs ten real prompts about your brand across four engines, which is a reasonable way to see where you stand before spending anything.

Set your expectations correctly on timing. Propagation across these indexes typically takes one to six months, and anyone promising you the top spot next week is selling something. Nobody controls what these engines output.

What I would do in the next 30 days

If I were starting over tomorrow, this is my order of operations.

Week one: audit robots.txt and Cloudflare settings, then fix NAP consistency across Google Business Profile, Yelp, Bing Places, and your top two industry directories.

Week two: rewrite your five most commercially important pages so the direct answer sits in the first 30 percent, with question-style headings and self-contained sections.

Week three: add real statistics, named-source citations, and at least one credible quotation to each of those pages. This is the tactic with the strongest research behind it.

Week four: build a 20-prompt tracking list covering brand-aware questions, solution-seeking questions, and problem-aware questions, then run your baseline.

The window is still open. Most of your competitors have not started, and the research says the smaller player gains more from this work than the incumbent does. That combination does not last forever.

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