More people are starting their research inside an AI tool. They ask ChatGPT for a recommendation, they use Perplexity to compare options, or they read the AI Overview at the top of Google before scrolling. If your business is not mentioned in those answers, you are missing conversations you never even see. The good news is that getting cited is not mysterious. It follows a set of steps you can actually work through.
Here is the practical version, in the order I would tackle it.
Step one: check whether you show up at all
Before you change anything, find out where you stand. This part is genuinely easy and most business owners have never done it.
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, and ask the kind of question a customer would ask. Not your company name, the category. "Who are the best wedding photographers in Norwich." "Recommend a commercial cleaning company in Norfolk." "What are good options for a Shopify developer in the UK." Try a few phrasings, because people ask in different ways.
Note who gets named. If it is your competitors and not you, that is your starting line. If nobody local is named at all, that is an opportunity, because the tools are reaching for whatever sources they can find and there is room to become one.
Step two: get the basics indexed
None of the clever stuff works if the machines cannot read your site. This is the unglamorous foundation.
- Make sure every important page is crawlable and actually indexed. Check Google Search Console for coverage issues.
- Fix slow pages and broken structure. If Google struggles with your site, so will the AI layer built on it.
- Give each page a clear job and a clear answer. One page, one topic, stated plainly.
- Make it obvious who you are: business name, location, what you do, contact details, all consistent across the site.
This is the same technical hygiene that has always underpinned SEO. AI search did not replace it, it depends on it.
Step three: earn mentions on sites the models trust
This is the lever most people underestimate. AI tools decide who to recommend partly from where you are talked about across the web. If several trusted sources mention you in the right context, you become a safe answer for the model to give.
The sources worth targeting:
- Industry publications and respected blogs in your field.
- Reputable directories and local listings relevant to your area and sector.
- Reddit and forums, where genuine discussion carries real weight with these tools.
- Comparison and "best of" posts that round up options in your category.
You cannot fake your way onto these convincingly, and you should not try. Earn the mentions the honest way: do work worth talking about, get listed where your customers actually look, contribute useful answers in communities, and build relationships with the people who write the roundups. A handful of genuine, well-placed mentions does more than a hundred spammy ones.
Step four: write in liftable, self-contained passages
An AI system wants to quote a clean answer. If your key point is buried in a long, meandering paragraph, it is hard to lift. If it sits in a tidy, standalone passage, it is easy.
So structure content around real questions. Use a clear heading that matches the question, then answer it directly in the first sentence or two, before you add the detail. Imagine someone could copy that opening passage on its own and it would still make sense and still be correct. That is the test.
Frequently asked questions, clear how-to sections and short definitional passages all do well here, because they are already shaped the way a model wants to quote them. Write for the person first, but write so a machine can pick up your best sentence without mangling it.
Step five: add structured data
Structured data, or schema markup, is code that tells search engines exactly what a page is: a local business, a product, a review, an FAQ, an article. It removes guesswork. When a machine can read your details as clean, labelled data rather than inferring them from the layout, it trusts and reuses them more readily.
At a minimum, mark up your organisation and local business details, and consider FAQ or article markup where it genuinely fits the page. This is more of an Alex job than mine, and it is worth getting a technical hand with, but it is not optional if you are serious about AI visibility.
Putting it together
The pattern should be clear by now. Get indexed, be trustworthy, be mentioned in the right places, be quotable, be readable to machines. Every one of those steps also improves your ordinary search performance, which is exactly why it is worth doing. You are not chasing one tool, you are building the kind of presence every discovery surface rewards.
Start with step one this week. Ask the tools about your own category and see who they name. If it is not you, our SEO and AI search work is built to close that gap, and the first thing we do is find out where you currently stand.