“Recommend a branding studio for a SaaS company” or “how much does a CRM rollout cost for a small business” are questions customers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini, or see answered next to Google’s results in AI Overviews. The answer often names a few companies and links to a few sources. The question is: how does the assistant know whom to name.
Where assistants get their information
There are two mechanisms, and it’s worth telling them apart:
- Knowledge from training. The model learned from web text up to a certain date. If little or inconsistent information about your company was written by then, the model “knows” little about it.
- Live search. Assistants with web access look up pages while answering, using search engines and their own crawlers, and then summarize what they found. AI Overviews rely on Google’s index.
An important conclusion follows from the second mechanism: ordinary search visibility is still the foundation. A site that search engines can’t find or don’t understand rarely makes it into AI answers.
What’s in your control
- Don’t block the crawlers you care about. Check your robots.txt. Crawlers that collect data for training models and the crawlers behind assistants’ search are often different bots. OpenAI, for example, separates GPTBot, which collects training data, from OAI-SearchBot, which powers search in ChatGPT. You can block one without blocking the other.
- State facts plainly. What you do, for whom, where, at what prices and on what timeline. An assistant can quote “We design websites for B2B companies from $9,600 / €8,800 net.” It has no use for “We create digital experiences that inspire.”
- Answer customers’ questions. Sections with questions and short, direct answers at the start of the paragraph are easy to summarize.
- Keep content in the page text. Information locked in an image, a PDF or an element that appears only after a click is harder to read.
- Add structured data. A description of the company, its services and prices in schema.org format helps search engines understand the site. It doesn’t guarantee a place in answers, but it doesn’t hurt.
- Keep your details consistent across the web. The same name, description and contact details on the website, in your Google Business Profile, on LinkedIn and in directories.
- Be present where your industry is discussed. Assistants readily cite roundups, comparisons, industry articles and forum discussions. Customer reviews, interviews and guest articles give them material, and along the way build what Google describes as E-E-A-T.
How to measure it
- Ask yourself. Once a month, ask several assistants the same questions your customers ask and note whether and how your company appears. Answers change, so the trend matters, not a single result.
- Check assistant traffic in analytics. Visits from domains such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai show up as traffic sources, and some assistants add parameters to links, such as utm_source=chatgpt.com.
- Ask customers how they heard about you. “ChatGPT recommended you” shows up in forms more and more often.
What to watch out for
Nobody controls which sources an assistant picks for a given answer. Treat offers of a “guaranteed place in ChatGPT” with great caution. The same goes for new file formats for models such as llms.txt: it’s a proposal, and the major search engines haven’t confirmed they use it.
The surest route is boring: a good, fast website with specific facts, consistent company details and other people writing about you. If you’d like us to take care of it, see how we approach marketing.
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