If I had a nickel for every time someone asked, "How do I get my business to show up in ChatGPT?", I'd be rich.
It's become one of the biggest questions in digital marketing over the last year, and for good reason. People aren't just Googling anymore; They're asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity who they should hire, what software they should buy, and where they should spend their money.
So naturally, businesses want to know: How do I become one of those recommendations?
The honest answer? No one knows for sure… but, we're starting to see clear patterns. While everything we know is to some degree speculatory, here are some of the core findings that have come out.
Schema, Schema, and More Schema
If you asked an old-school SEO about schema 5 years ago, they’d probably shrug it off as an archaic system people hadn’t paid attention to in years (besides to create rich snippets in search results). AI has brought it back in full force.
Schema takes the work of interpreting what your website is about out of the AI’s hands, and instead hands them a nice, neat description of who you are, what you do, and how you should be understood.
Brand Mentions on Forums & Review Sites
One of the big differences between SEO and GEO is that GEO is all about coming to a consensus. While brands can rank well without any social media platforms, reviews, or social proof on traditional search engines, that isn’t the case for AI. When you ask your Claude to find you the “best marketing agency”, it actually doesn’t trust itself to make that call of who’s the best on its own; it’s going to hunt down the agency with the most 5 star reviews on their site, positive mentions on socials, and many listing platforms all pointing to the same answer.
How should you adapt to that? Claim every listing you can on sites like Yelp, Google My Business, Capterra, or any site that is relevant to your industry. Encourage your customers to leave reviews. Keep your listings up to date and use consistent verbiage across the board. Bonus: this will also help you get backlinks for your site!
YouTube and Rich Media
More than ever, variety of content matters. Embedding multi-format assets like videos (especially on platforms like YouTube, which Google's AI heavily indexes) or original diagrams signals high value to users and in-depth content coverage, which makes you a more reputable source.
On a more technical note, AI engines read video transcripts, image alt text, and surrounding text; so, by adding more keyword and entity variations to your page, it makes it a richer target for data extraction.
So, if your business has ever considering making video content, expanding social channels to YouTube, or you can dig down deeper on blog content, now is the time to do it
How do I know if I’m actually getting mentioned by AI?
The short answer: you can’t exactly. Because everyone’s AI agent is loaded with historical context, specific prompting, and no third party platform has full access to all of ChatGPT, Claude, or anyone else’s conversion logs, there is no way to know for sure. But, there are a couple ways to keep a finger on the pulse.
First up, Google has made some incredibly helpful modifications to their platforms to adapt to this over the past few months. What used to be digging through UTM parameters and sorting by source in GA4 has now been conveniently replaced by a default session category of “AI Agent”. So, you can go directly into your website analytics and see at a glance how much of your traffic is driven by AI. If you take that a step further, you can also dive deeper into what their landing page was to see what might have driven them there (ie, blog page = information search, homepage = service search).
Secondly, in early June Google launched Generative AI reports on Google Search Console. The new Search Console reports give you dedicated views of your impressions within generative AI features on Search, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as generative AI features in Discover. While these aren’t yet rolled out to every account, they will be coming in the future.
The reality on all these third party platforms like SEMrush and Ahrefs that are jumping on the AI train to sell AI-specialized tracking products is this: it’s an educated hunch. The only thing you can truly trust at this stage of the game is your own first-party data.
So, what do I do with all this?
If you don’t know where to start, call us and we’ll help you get started.
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