How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity

When an AI assistant answers a question with links, those links were selected. Understanding the selection criteria is the whole game.

Step One: Be Crawlable by AI Agents

Many sites unintentionally block AI crawlers in robots.txt or behind aggressive bot protection. Check that GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot are permitted if you want to be cited. You cannot be quoted from a page nobody can read.

Step Two: Answer the Question in the First Fifty Words

Retrieval systems chunk pages and score the chunks. A heading that poses the question with an immediate, self-contained answer under it produces a high-scoring chunk. Long preambles produce nothing.

Step Three: Be Specific and Verifiable

Models prefer sources with concrete detail: numbers, dates, named places, defined processes. "We serve the Hudson Valley" is weak. "We serve Ulster, Dutchess, and Orange counties, typically within a 35-mile radius of Highland, NY" is quotable.

Step Four: Publish an llms.txt File

A plain-text summary of your site's key pages and facts gives agents a fast, unambiguous map of who you are. It takes an hour and remarkably few local businesses have one.

Step Five: Keep Dates Fresh

Retrieval systems weight recency heavily for commercial and local queries. A page last updated in 2023 loses to a near-identical page updated last month.

Step Six: Earn Third-Party Corroboration

Models cross-check. A claim that appears only on your own site is weaker than one echoed by a local news mention, an association page, or a review platform.

Next Step

Our free visibility snapshot runs your site against these signals and tells you exactly which ones are missing.