How to Get Cited by ChatGPT, Not Just Ranked by Google

From a page of links to one answer

Search used to work like a library card catalog. You asked, it handed you a list, and you went digging. AI answer engines work more like a well-read friend. You ask a question, and they give you one answer, sometimes with a few sources attached.

That changes the game. Showing up on page one still matters, but there's a second question now: when an AI tool answers a question about your industry or your town, does it understand your business well enough to mention you, and trust your site enough to cite it? Working on that is answer engine optimization, or AEO.

How AI tools decide what to say

They lean on what they can read and what they can trust. Some answers come from what a model learned in training, and many now come from live searches the tool runs on your behalf. Either way, the sites that get cited tend to have clear, specific, consistent information that a machine can understand without guessing.

Five things that actually help

1. Answer real questions, plainly. Write down the questions your customers actually ask, then answer each one in the first sentence or two before adding detail. "Do you offer weekend appointments?" deserves a page that says yes or no right away.

2. Be specific about who you are. What you do, where, for whom, since when, and what it costs to get started. Vague marketing language gives an AI nothing to repeat.

3. Keep your facts identical everywhere. Your name, address, phone number and hours should match on your website, your Google Business Profile and every directory listing. Conflicting details make machines, and people, less confident.

4. Make your site easy for machines to read. One main heading per page, real headings in order, descriptive page titles, image descriptions, and fast pages that work on phones.

5. Label your content with structured data. This is the technical part, and it's where a lot of small business sites fall short.

Under the hood Structured data is a block of code (JSON-LD, using the schema.org vocabulary) that tells machines exactly what's on a page: this is an Organization with this name, logo and phone number; this is a LocalBusiness with these hours; this is an Article by this author, published on this date; these are questions with these answers. Search engines use it to understand and display your pages, and it takes the guesswork out for any tool reading them. It's part of how we build, and we validate it before launch.

What about llms.txt?

You may have heard of llms.txt, a plain-text file that summarizes your business for AI tools. It's a newer proposal, not a standard every AI tool follows yet, so think of it as a cheap, smart bet rather than a magic switch.

Under the hood An llms.txt file lives at yourdomain.com/llms.txt and is written in Markdown: a short summary of who you are, then links to your most important pages with a sentence about each. Webflow lets you upload one in site settings, and it goes live with your next publish. We write it from the same facts as your structured data, so the two tell the same story.

Don't accidentally lock the door

Some sites block AI crawlers in their robots.txt file, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident through a plugin or a security setting. If you want to be cited, make sure the tools can actually read you. Whether to let them in is a business decision, and we'll walk you through the trade-offs.

A note on patience

AEO isn't a switch you flip. AI tools refresh what they know on their own schedules, and nobody, us included, can promise you'll be cited for a particular question. What we can do is make your site the clearest, most trustworthy source on your subject, which helps your regular search results too. Good AEO is good SEO with better manners.

Where to start

Technical SEO and AEO are part of every site we build and part of our full partnership. It's also one more reason to keep your site current: an AI can only repeat what your site says, so a website your team can't edit is a website teaching the robots old news. And if you've wondered whether an AI could just build the whole site for you, we tackled that in why not just ask AI for a website.

Curious what AI tools say about your business today? Book a free consult and we'll look together.