How to get mentioned by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews

More people ask AI assistants instead of searching. Assistants answer from what is written about you across the web — so the work is part SEO, part reputation.

Updated: 2026-10-04

How assistants decide what to cite

Assistants with web access (Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Google AI Overviews) retrieve pages that match the question and summarise them. Models also learn from text that existed when they were trained. Both reward the same things: pages that answer a question clearly, and a brand that is mentioned consistently on independent sites.

1. Make your own pages easy to quote

• Put the main answer in the first paragraph, in plain words.
• Use descriptive headings, short lists and tables with real numbers.
• Serve the text in the HTML itself — many crawlers don't run JavaScript.
• Add structured data (Organization, FAQ, Article) and keep titles and descriptions accurate.

2. Tell AI crawlers what you are

Publish an llms.txt file — a short Markdown summary of what the product does, with links to key pages. It is a proposed convention, not a standard, but it costs nothing. Check that robots.txt doesn't block the crawlers you want (for example GPTBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended).

3. Be mentioned where assistants look

Assistants trust what others say about you more than what you say about yourself. Useful places: niche sites and blogs, comparison and "best tools" articles, Reddit and other communities, review directories, and podcasts or YouTube transcripts. Each honest mention in context is a data point. Article exchanges with sites in your niche (labelled as partner content) are one way to build this — it's what the Satelo exchange is for.

4. Publish something worth citing

Original data gets cited: a benchmark, a price study, a free tool. Assistants and journalists both prefer a primary source over a rewrite.

5. Measure it

Regularly ask the main assistants the questions your customers ask, and note whether and how you are mentioned and which pages they cite. Track it monthly — it changes slowly, but it changes.

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