How to Get Found by ChatGPT and Other AI Answers

Customers now ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot who to hire, and Google answers many searches with an AI Overview before the list of links. The work of showing up in those answers goes by GEO (generative engine optimization), AEO (answer engine optimization) or AI SEO. They’re names for the same job, and most of it is ordinary, careful work on your website and your listings.

This guide covers how AI answers pick the businesses they name, what makes a website easy for them to use, and the steps to take.

How AI answers pick a business

When a question needs current facts, like who fixes leaks in your town, most AI assistants search the web first and write the answer from what comes back. Each one searches its own way.

Assistant	Where it looks
ChatGPT	OpenAI’s own search, filled by its search bot, OAI-SearchBot
Claude	Anthropic’s search, filled by Claude-SearchBot
Perplexity	Perplexity’s own index, filled by PerplexityBot
Google AI Overviews and AI Mode	Google’s regular Search index
Microsoft Copilot	Bing

A study of 158,099 AI answers, published in October 2026, found two things worth knowing. Every page ChatGPT cited was one its own search had found, and ChatGPT rewrites each question into searches of its own that rarely match what Google or Bing would return. Pages whose titles and paragraphs matched the questions people ask were cited more. ChatGPT also named businesses it already knew, sometimes with no page behind the mention at all.

So there are two jobs. Be easy to find and read when an assistant searches, and be known well enough that it thinks of you.

Treat AI like a customer

An assistant reading your website wants what a new customer wants: what you do, where, for whom, what it costs and how to reach you, stated plainly and still true today. A site that serves that customer well serves the assistant too. Three things matter most.

• Legible. Each service has its own page, written in your customers’ words. Prices, hours and service areas are text on the page, not locked in a photo or a PDF. The same facts are also in structured data, so machines don’t have to guess.
• Clean, fast and secure. Pages load quickly on a phone, nothing is broken, and the site runs on HTTPS. A slow or broken page loses the customer before anything else.
• Current. Hours, prices, staff and services match reality. An assistant repeats whatever your site says, including what stopped being true last spring.

Asking the assistants about your business is how you learn where the gaps are. A wrong answer is useful feedback: it shows you what your site, your profile or your listings left unclear.

Shortcuts that don’t exist

• Paying for a spot in the answer. There’s no submission form and no paid listing inside an AI answer. Google says there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. ChatGPT now shows ads to some users, but OpenAI labels them, keeps them separate from the answer and says ads do not influence the answers ChatGPT gives. Can you pay to get listed in ChatGPT? walks through the common pitches.
• A guaranteed mention. Anyone who promises one is selling something nobody can deliver.
• Markup that says more than the page. Structured data describing reviews, services or questions a visitor can’t see breaks Google’s rules, and it won’t fool an assistant that reads the page itself.
• Hundreds of thin pages. A page per town or per keyword with nothing new on it doesn’t answer anyone’s question.

Do this

1. Ask the assistants about your business the way a customer would. Try “Who’s a good [your trade] in [your town]?” and “What does [your business] charge for [service]?” in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. Write down who gets named, and anything said about you that’s wrong or out of date. Answers change from one try to the next, so ask each question a few times.
2. Let the search bots in. Your site’s robots.txt shouldn’t block OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot or Bingbot. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Training bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended are a separate choice, and blocking them doesn’t remove you from search answers. Which AI bots your website should allow goes bot by bot.
3. Make sure Google and Bing have your site. Add it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit your sitemap to both. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode only link to pages in its index. Bing feeds Copilot, and Bing Webmaster Tools now has an AI Performance report that shows how often Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries cite your pages.
4. Fill in your listings, the same way everywhere. Complete your Google Business Profile and your Bing Places listing: name, address, phone, hours, services and photos. Google says businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local results, and Bing says Bing Places helps keep your details eligible for AI-generated answers. Then check the directories your customers use, like Yelp, Apple Maps and your trade’s own directories, for the same name, address and hours.
5. Give each service its own page that answers real questions. Use the words your customers use, in the page title and the first paragraph. Say what you do, where, for whom and roughly what it costs, as text on the page. Add a short answer to each question customers ask you on the phone.
6. Say it in structured data too. Mark up your business with LocalBusiness or Organization markup (name, address, phone, hours), each service with Service markup, and real question-and-answer sections with FAQPage markup. Add sameAs links to your Google, Yelp, Bing and social profiles, which tells machines those listings are all the same business. Google’s rule is that structured data must match what’s visible on the page. If your site can publish an llms.txt file, a short plain-text summary of who you are and what’s where, add one too.
7. Keep the site fast, secure and current. Check that pages load quickly on a phone and that the site uses HTTPS. When hours, prices or services change, change the site the same day, along with your profiles.
8. Get mentioned in places assistants read. Reviews that name the job and the town, your chamber of commerce or trade association, supplier and partner pages, local news and trade directories. ChatGPT favors businesses and websites it already knows, and a business becomes known by being written about.
9. Check again every month. Ask the same questions from step 1 and compare. Fix what’s wrong at the source: your site, your profiles and your listings.

How long it takes

OpenAI and Perplexity both say a robots.txt change reaches their search within about a day. New and changed pages show up once search engines revisit them, usually within days to weeks. Listings, reviews and mentions build over months. What a model knows without searching changes only when the model is retrained, so the slowest part is the part that rests on your reputation. Nobody can promise a date.

Who does the work

Every step above is one you can take yourself, and plenty of owners do.

The easiest way to get found is a website that’s legible, clean, fast, secure and current, and Surmado Sites handles all of that. It builds your site with fast pages, metadata and structured data on every page, and writing that people and AI can both follow, with no software for you to keep patched. When something changes, you tell Scout in plain English, and a person checks each change before it goes live. Your membership includes research Jobs every month, so Scout can run AI Visibility to learn where the gaps are in what seven AI platforms say about you, then fix your site where it’s unclear or out of date. Pro+ adds Blog Automation, a post most weeks written from your real business facts, so assistants have more pages that answer your customers’ questions.

Comparing ways to measure AI visibility? See how Scout compares to other AI visibility tools.