Many businesses want to appear when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or another AI tool for a recommendation. These systems choose what to show, and their answers can vary. No legitimate optimisation step guarantees a mention or citation.
Start with information your business controls
Make your website clear about your organisation, services, location and contact details. Keep important facts consistent across your site and the profiles you manage. Correct outdated pages and remove conflicting claims where possible.
Publish genuinely useful source material
Create pages that answer the questions customers actually ask. Explain how a service works, who it is suitable for, what affects cost and what a buyer should consider. Use specific examples only when they are real, authorised and explained with context.
Make expertise and authorship verifiable
Identify who wrote or reviewed important material when that adds accountability. Link to relevant credentials or primary sources, distinguish fact from opinion and keep dates accurate when information changes. Structured data can describe visible information; it cannot manufacture credibility.
Check access and usefulness
- Ensure important pages are public and work on mobile.
- Use descriptive titles, headings and internal links.
- Keep business profiles accurate and complete.
- Review analytics and available referral data; don't assume every AI visit can be attributed.
- Record observations over time, since a single prompt or answer is not a reliable visibility benchmark.
Measure what you can actually influence
Track useful outcomes such as qualified enquiries, visits to key service pages and customer questions. If you manually test AI answers, record the prompt, date, location and tool version, and treat the result as an example—not a ranking report. A missing citation does not prove that your wider marketing is failing.
The practical aim is not to manipulate an answer. It is to give customers and information systems a clearer, more accurate picture of your work and to make the next step useful when someone does find you.