How to Get Your Business Recommended by ChatGPT and Perplexity

When someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a marketing agency in London, or asks Perplexity which accounting software is best for a small business, two things happen. Either your business is part of the answer, or it isn’t. Getting recommended by AI engines isn’t about luck or paying for placement. It comes down to a specific set of practices that make AI engines trust your business enough to mention it. This guide walks you through them, step by step.

Worth knowing:  AI engines don’t sell placement. There are no ads in ChatGPT answers. Every recommendation is earned through content quality, credibility, and structure. That’s actually good news for businesses willing to put in the work.

Why does AI recommend some businesses and not others?

AI engines build their answers from the information available about your business across the entire web. They evaluate that information on three questions: Is this source trustworthy? Does it directly answer the user’s question? Is it clearly structured enough to quote?

A business that passes all three tests gets cited. A business that fails any one of them gets skipped, even if it’s the best option in the market. That’s why excellent businesses with poor digital presences consistently lose out to mediocre ones with well-optimized content.

Step 1: Find out what you’re currently missing

Before changing anything, run an honest audit. Open ChatGPT with browsing enabled, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview. Then search for the questions your customers actually ask before hiring someone like you or buying something like what you sell. A few examples:

  • ‘What should I look for in a digital marketing agency?’
  • ‘Which project management tool is best for a team of ten people?’
  • ‘How do I find a reliable solicitor for a property purchase?’
  • ‘What’s the best way to ship products to customers in Europe?’

Write down what comes up. Which businesses are mentioned? What sources are cited? What language does the AI use to describe the recommended options? This audit gives you a benchmark and shows you exactly who you’re competing against for AI visibility.

Step 2: Restructure your most important pages around questions

The most common reason businesses don’t appear in AI answers is that their website content isn’t structured as answers to questions. It’s structured as descriptions of services. Those are two very different things.

A services page that says ‘We offer comprehensive digital marketing solutions for growing businesses’ answers no question anyone actually asks. A page that opens with ‘What does a digital marketing agency actually do for a small business?’ and then answers it directly is what AI engines are looking for.

Here’s the structure that works:

  1. Use a real question as your H1 heading. Not ‘Our SEO Services’. Something like ‘How Does SEO Help a Small Business Grow?’
  2. Answer the question in the first two or three sentences. Don’t build up to it. Lead with it.
  3. Use subheadings (H2 and H3) as follow-up questions. Each section should address the next logical thing someone would want to know.
  4. Keep paragraphs short. Three to four sentences maximum. One idea per paragraph.
  5. Add a FAQ section at the bottom of every important page. Five to eight questions, each one phrased the way a real customer would ask it.

GEO Insight:  The format AI engines quote most often is: a clear question as the heading, followed immediately by a direct two to three sentence answer, then supporting detail. If your pages follow this pattern, you’re giving AI engines exactly what they need to cite you.

Step 3: Build credibility signals outside your own website

Your website alone isn’t enough. AI engines cross-reference what you say about yourself against what third-party sources say about you. A business that only has its own website as a source is less trustworthy to an AI than one that’s mentioned in industry publications, review platforms, and professional directories.

Get mentioned in reputable publications

A single mention in a relevant trade publication, a local business news site, or an industry blog can significantly increase how credible AI considers you. You don’t need to be in the national press. You need to be in the places your specific audience, and the AI engines that serve them, consider authoritative.

Practical ways to get mentioned: issue press releases for genuine milestones, offer expert commentary to journalists covering your industry, write guest articles for trade publications, and participate as a speaker or panelist at industry events.

Build your presence on authoritative platforms

Make sure your business has a complete, accurate, and consistent presence on the platforms AI engines consult. These include:

  • Google Business Profile, fully completed with services, hours, and recent posts
  • LinkedIn company page with regular professional updates
  • Trustpilot, Google Reviews, or relevant industry review platforms
  • Industry-specific directories and association listings
  • Crunchbase or similar business databases if you’re a B2B company
  • YouTube channel with useful explainer videos if your topic lends itself to video

Encourage and respond to reviews

Reviews are a significant input to AI recommendations, especially for local and service businesses. AI engines read review content, not just star ratings. A business with dozens of specific, detailed reviews about what it’s actually good at will be cited differently than one with generic five-star ratings. Actively ask satisfied customers to leave detailed reviews, and respond to every review publicly.

Step 4: Add FAQ Schema markup to your pages

FAQ Schema is a type of structured data you add to your website’s code (in JSON-LD format) that tells search engines and AI crawlers exactly where your questions and answers are. It’s one of the most direct technical signals you can give an AI engine, and it’s free to implement.

Every guide, service page, and explainer on your site should have FAQ Schema. The questions in your Schema markup should be phrased exactly the way a real customer would speak them, not in formal keyword language. ‘How much does it cost to hire a marketing agency?’ works far better than ‘Marketing agency pricing structure.’

Step 5: Make sure your content stays current

AI engines heavily deprioritize outdated content. A page last updated in 2022 signals to AI that the information may no longer be accurate. In fast-moving fields like technology, finance, law, and healthcare, this is particularly damaging.

Build a regular content review process into your calendar. At minimum, audit your most important pages quarterly. Update any statistics, refresh any examples that have become outdated, and revise any advice that no longer reflects current best practice. Always update the published date when you make meaningful changes.

How long before you start seeing results?

Perplexity and Google’s AI Overview pull live web content, so improvements to your site can start showing results within weeks if your content is well structured. ChatGPT’s static knowledge base updates on a longer cycle, so visibility there takes more time to build.

The businesses that see the fastest results are usually those that already have a solid SEO foundation and a genuine area of expertise. They’re not starting from zero. They’re restructuring what they already have so that AI engines can find, understand, and cite it.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need to be on every AI engine?

Focus on the three that matter most for your audience: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overview. Those three cover the vast majority of AI-driven searches in most Western markets. Once you’ve built a strong presence on those, Bing Copilot and Claude are natural next priorities.

What if I’m already ranking well on Google? Does that help with GEO?

Yes, significantly. Google’s index is one of the primary sources AI engines use to understand what’s on the web. Strong SEO foundations, including quality backlinks, fast load times, and well-structured content, give you a head start on GEO. The additional work is mainly about restructuring your content to answer questions directly and building external credibility signals.

How do I know if an AI engine is describing my business accurately?

Test it regularly. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity directly: ‘What do you know about [your business name]?’ and ‘How is [your business] described in your field?’ Document the answers. If AI engines are saying something inaccurate or outdated, the fix is to publish fresh, authoritative content that gives them a better, more current source to draw from.

Is this only relevant for businesses that sell to consumers?

GEO matters for B2B businesses just as much as B2C. B2B buyers increasingly use AI engines for research before entering a sales process. A procurement manager asking Perplexity which CRM platform is best for a 50-person sales team is carrying out exactly the kind of query that GEO is designed to capture.