AI assistants recommend businesses they can verify. That means consistent company facts across the web, pages that answer one question each with concrete numbers, and independent sources (reviews, directories, discussions) that repeat your story back. Classic SEO still matters, because most AI tools read search results, but it is no longer the whole job.
The shift is measurable. When Google shows an AI Overview, clicks to the top result drop by about a third, 34.5% in Ahrefs’ study of 300,000 keywords. A growing share of buyers never see your site: they see what an AI says about you. This guide covers what the AI engines cite, what to change on your site, and what to skip.
What AI engines cite
Semrush’s AI visibility study looked at what ChatGPT and its rivals reference when they answer. Two content types dominate. Community sources come first: Wikipedia, Reddit, review platforms, places where people other than the brand say what the brand does. Separate research from 5W found Wikipedia and Reddit alone drive over a quarter of ChatGPT citations in the US.
Structured factual pages come second: clear specifications, transparent pricing, verifiable claims. The Semrush team’s phrasing is worth keeping: AI models cite content they can “confidently reference”. A page that says “affordable websites for ambitious brands” gives a model nothing to hold. A page that says “a 5–10 page business site costs £3,500 to £8,000 and takes three to five weeks” gives it a fact, and models repeat facts.
Polished marketing pages, the study notes, rarely make the citation lists at all.
Make your company verifiable
An AI deciding whether to recommend you runs a background check with the patience of a machine. It reads your site, then checks whether the rest of the internet agrees.
Start with entity consistency. Your business name, address, registration and services should match everywhere they appear: your site, Companies House, your Google profile, every directory. Conflicting facts read as risk, and models hedge on risk. That same consistency is the foundation of local SEO, so the work earns you map visibility while it earns AI trust. Mark the facts up with Organization structured data and point sameAs at your real external profiles so the connections are explicit rather than guessed.
Then give the machine somewhere independent to look. Reviews on platforms like Clutch or Trustpilot, a filled-in directory profile, a client site crediting your work: each one is corroboration you don’t control, which is why it counts. This is slow work with no shortcut, since fake reviews and padded profiles are exactly what the models are trained to discount.
Publish your proof where a crawler can read it. We keep company registration, ICO registration and insurance on a public trust page, so a model checking whether ICE WIND is real can settle the question in one request.
Finally, check your robots.txt. OpenAI’s search crawler, Perplexity’s and Google’s need access before any of this pays off. Blocking OAI-SearchBot while hoping ChatGPT recommends you is a mistake we’ve seen on live client sites.
Make your content citable
Structure your site so each page answers one question a customer asks. One intent per page beats one page listing ten services, which is why we split our web development, web design and other services into separate pages: a model matching “who builds e-commerce sites in London” needs a page about that, not a homepage about everything.
On each page, put the direct answer in the first paragraph and let the detail follow. Assistants lift their quotes from openings.
Publish numbers you can stand behind. Prices, timelines, project sizes. Vague content protects you from nothing and gets cited for nothing; our own most-referenced page is the one that states plainly what a website costs in the UK. Keep dates on articles and refresh stale facts, because models discount pages that look abandoned.
And keep passing classic SEO: crawlable HTML, working sitemap, sensible titles, internal links. Perplexity and ChatGPT lean on search indexes to find candidates before they cite anyone. GEO extends SEO; it doesn’t replace it.
What to skip
Skip AI-bait pages written for robots: keyword-stuffed “best agency in London” lists, thin location pages, FAQ farms. Models learn from human-quality signals, and content no human would read gets filtered the same way search engines learned to filter it years ago.
Skip inflated claims outright. Unverifiable awards, invented client counts and borrowed logos now carry a new cost: an AI that finds a claim contradicted elsewhere downgrades its trust in everything else you say.
Skip obsessing over any single tool’s answer. Responses vary by phrasing, day and model. The work above raises your odds in every tool at once, and it keeps paying off as new assistants launch on the same public data.
If you’d rather have this done than read about it, this checklist, entity data, structured pages, trust signals, is part of how we build every site, and it is what our AI search optimisation work covers end to end. Send a short brief through start a project and we’ll show you what it looks like applied to your business.