AI assistants recommend businesses they can clearly identify, find described the same way across the web, and quote with confidence. You can’t buy a mention, but you can make your business easy to understand, easy to quote and easy to verify. This is the same work we started on our own site this month, and the steps below are what we recommend to clients.
How AI assistants pick businesses to mention
When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot or Google’s AI Overviews to recommend a supplier, the assistant typically searches the web, reads a handful of pages, and writes an answer from them. It leans on:
- Pages that state answers plainly, so a sentence can be lifted and quoted.
- Sources other than your own site: directories, review platforms, articles, forums and community answers that mention you.
- Consistency: the same name, services, location and people described the same way everywhere.
If your business only describes itself on its own website, an assistant has little reason to trust or mention it.
The four things you can control
1. Be a clear entity
Make it obvious who you are:
- Use one business name everywhere, and the same address and phone number on every listing.
- Open your About page with a one-sentence definition: who you are, what you do, where, and for whom.
- Add structured data (Organization, Person, Service and FAQ schema) so machines can read your details without guessing.
- Link your site to your official profiles (LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, review sites) and link them back.
2. Write answers that can be quoted
- Put the question in the heading and the answer in the first two sentences, with a number where possible.
- Use tables for prices, comparisons and specifications.
- Show who wrote it and when it was last updated.
- Publish real numbers from your own work, with their source (for example, “Google Search Console, January to April”).
3. Earn mentions elsewhere
- Create profiles on the directories and review platforms buyers in your field use, and ask happy clients for reviews.
- Contribute expert quotes to journalists and industry blogs.
- Answer questions helpfully in communities where your buyers ask them. Be useful, not promotional; AI tools and people both see through spam.
4. Keep it fresh
Update your key pages when prices, services or results change, and add new material regularly. Stale pages are less likely to be chosen as sources.
What we changed on our own site
To practise what we recommend, we made these changes to webiclouds.com in October 2026:
- Added Organization, founder (Person) and Service structured data, with our published starting prices on every service page.
- Rewrote the FAQs on six service pages so each question has a short, direct answer, and marked them up as FAQs.
- Named both founders with links to their LinkedIn profiles across the site.
- Removed an outdated cached page that described our business inaccurately.
Next on our list are third-party profiles, client reviews and case studies, because mentions on other sites matter as much as anything on our own.
A simple monthly check
Once a month, ask five AI assistants the same ten questions a buyer would ask, such as “best Etsy marketing agency for a small shop” or “affordable Klaviyo agency for a Shopify store”. Record:
- Is your business mentioned?
- Which competitors are mentioned instead?
- Which sources does the assistant cite?
The cited sources tell you where to earn your next mention. In Google Analytics 4, also watch referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com.
What doesn’t work
- Fake reviews or planted forum posts. They break platform rules and damage trust when discovered.
- Keyword-stuffed pages “for AI”. Assistants quote clear writing, not repetition.
- Expecting instant results. Mentions build as your presence across the web grows; plan in months, not days.
Frequently asked questions
Is SEO still worth doing with AI search?
Yes. AI assistants mostly draw on pages that search engines can already find and trust, so good SEO is the foundation.
Does structured data guarantee an AI mention?
No. It helps machines understand your business, but mentions depend mostly on what the rest of the web says about you.
Can you help with AI search visibility?
Yes. It’s part of our Authority SEO plan, and we’re happy to run a free check of how AI assistants currently describe your business.
Want to know what ChatGPT says about your business today? Request a free audit and we’ll include an AI search check.