How to get cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity.

Short answer: to get cited by AI assistants, make your business the easiest, clearest source for them to quote. Publish structured, answer-first content, mark it up with schema, ground your business as a clear entity across the web, and earn third-party mentions on the sites those models trust. It's a compounding programme, not a switch — here's the exact order we work it.

Buyers have quietly changed how they choose. Instead of "plumber near me" in Google, they ask ChatGPT "who's a good plumber in Newcastle?" and act on the answer — often without a single search result. If the model doesn't mention you, you're not in the running, and you never see the customer you lost. Getting cited is the new page-one ranking.

The six things that decide whether AI cites you.

1. Can the AI crawlers reach you? The assistants send their own bots — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended. If your robots.txt blocks them you're invisible before you start. Allow them explicitly, publish a sitemap, and serve real HTML, not content that only appears after JavaScript runs.

2. Is your content structured for extraction? Answers get assembled from the clearest, most quotable passages on the web. One H1 per page, sequential headings, and every page and section opening with a direct answer in its first sentence — models lift the lead sentence. FAQ sections, comparison tables and definition lists are the exact shape an answer needs.

3. Do you have schema markup? JSON-LD tells the model what your content is. The high-leverage types are Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article, LocalBusiness and HowTo. A well-marked FAQPage is the single best on-page lever for answer extraction.

4. Are you a clear entity? Models resolve "who is this business" from consistent signals — a complete LinkedIn company page, a claimed Google Business Profile, a Crunchbase entry, a Wikidata item, and matching name, address and phone everywhere. Add every real profile to your site's Organization sameAs. Inconsistency confuses the model and costs you the citation.

5. Do trusted third parties mention you? The hardest and most valuable signal. Assistants weight sources they trust — directories, review platforms, "best of" listicles, Reddit, industry publications. A mention in a high-authority roundup is worth more than anything you can say about yourself. Earn these through listings, real reviews, guest posts and PR.

6. Are you ready for AI agents? The next wave is agents acting for the user. A clean llms.txt (a plain-language summary of who you are, what you offer, pricing and contact), machine-readable pricing, and a structured contact endpoint make you easy for an agent to use — and to recommend.

The 90-day plan we actually run.

• Weeks 1–2 — foundations: allow the AI bots, publish and verify your sitemap, add core schema (Organization, Service, FAQPage), ship a proper llms.txt.
• Weeks 3–6 — structure and content: rewrite key pages to open with direct answers, add FAQ sections with schema, publish answer-first articles targeting the questions your buyers ask an AI.
• Weeks 7–12 — authority: claim every entity profile, get listed where your category's buyers browse, gather real reviews, and earn third-party mentions.

Citations don't appear overnight — the models re-crawl and re-weight over weeks. But once you're the clearest source, you compound: every new mention makes the next citation more likely.

How to know where you stand.

You can't improve what you can't see. Run a free AI Visibility Audit at belver.ai/audit — it scores your site across these six dimensions in about two minutes and shows the exact, ranked fixes. It's the same tool we use with clients.

Common questions.

How long does it take to get cited by AI? Foundations land in a few weeks; citations build over the following one to three months as the models re-crawl and start to trust your signals. It's a programme, not a one-off fix.

Is this just SEO with a new name? No. SEO optimises for a ranked list of blue links; AI visibility optimises for the answer itself — being the source the model quotes. Structured data, entity clarity and citations matter more than keywords and backlinks alone.

What's the single highest-leverage change? For most sites: add FAQPage schema to a page that answers real buyer questions, and make sure your content opens with direct answers. That combination is what AI engines extract.