The short version: Getting mentioned by ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews has nothing to do with buying a “GEO package” from an agency. It comes down to writing content so specific and clearly structured that an AI model can lift a clean answer straight off your page. I tested this on my own site and three client sites over six weeks, and the pattern held every single time: plain, numbered, direct answers got cited. Clever brand storytelling never did, not once.
Why I started paying attention to this
My Google Search Console clicks have been drifting down for over a year, nothing dramatic, around 18% year on year, which is roughly what a lot of small business owners are quietly seeing too. What changed my mind about whether it mattered was my server logs. Referral hits from Perplexity and from ChatGPT’s browsing feature are now three times what they were this time last year. People are still finding my content. They’re just not clicking through Google to do it. They’re asking an AI, getting an answer with my name attached, and either that’s enough or they come find me directly.
That’s the bit most small business owners haven’t clocked yet. Your prospect might never see your website. They see a summary an AI wrote using your website. If your website isn’t written in a way that gets picked up, you’re invisible in a conversation that’s happening about you anyway.
What happens when someone asks an AI about your industry
Most AI tools people use for research now (ChatGPT with browsing turned on, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews) don’t just answer from memory. They pull in live pages, scan them fast, and lift out whatever answers the question most directly. There’s no algorithm rewarding you for a nicely written “our story” page. There’s a model looking for the sentence that answers the question in front of it, ideally with a number attached, ideally near the top.
The test I ran: six weeks, 40 prompts, three clients
I took 40 real, customer-phrased questions across three client industries: a corporate gifting company, an HR consultancy, and a Kent-based furniture maker. Every week for six weeks I ran the same 40 prompts through ChatGPT and Perplexity and logged which sites got named or quoted. A few things showed up so consistently I stopped being surprised by them:
- Pages that answered the question in the first two sentences, in plain bolded text, got cited roughly four times as often as pages that opened with context, history, or a warm introduction first.
- Any page containing a number (a price, a timeframe, a percentage) outperformed the equivalent page with vague language like “many customers” or “a range of options.”
- Comparison and list-style pages did consistently well. Straight prose paragraphs, even good ones, did not.
- Not one brand mission statement or “our journey” page got quoted across all six weeks and all 40 prompts. Not once.
- An ordinary blog post with a short FAQ block bolted onto the end outperformed a standalone FAQ page every time. The models seem to like the question sitting right next to a full answer with context, not isolated on its own page.
Seven things that get you cited
Based on that test, and on a few years of watching how this space moves, here’s what I’d tell any small business owner to do first, in order of effort versus payoff:
- Answer the question in the first two sentences. Save the context and the backstory for paragraph three, not paragraph one.
- Use real numbers, not vague words. “Costs between £45 and £120” beats “affordable pricing” every time an AI is deciding what to quote.
- Structure your headings as questions people type. “How much does X cost” as an h2 gets matched to the prompt far more reliably than a clever headline.
- Add a plain FAQ block to your ordinary posts. Not a separate page nobody links to. Bolt it onto the content that’s already ranking.
- Write narrow, specific pages instead of one giant “ultimate guide.” A page that answers one question well beats a 6,000 word page that tries to answer twenty.
- Update old pages rather than only publishing new ones. Freshness seems to matter to these models more than it ever mattered to Google.
- Get named somewhere other people control. A Companies House listing, a trade press mention, a useful tool other sites link to, like an interactive calculator people bookmark and share, all feed into whether an AI model trusts your business enough to name it.
The part nobody selling “GEO services” wants to say out loud
Three people have asked me in the last two months whether I can guarantee their business gets mentioned by ChatGPT. I tell them no, and I mean it. Nobody can guarantee that, and anyone charging £2,000 to £3,000 a month with a “guarantee” attached is repackaging an old SEO retainer with a new name on the invoice. I’ve seen the decks. Half of them are still measuring “keyword rankings” as the proof of success, which tells you the agency hasn’t tested any of this itself.
The uncomfortable truth is that you cannot buy your way into an AI answer the way you could once buy your way up a Google results page with backlinks. The models are pulling from pages that are useful and specific, full stop. If your content is vague, an agency polishing your meta descriptions won’t fix that. If you’re serious about this and don’t have the time to run the kind of six-week test I did, it’s worth talking to someone who has run these tests rather than someone selling a package built on last year’s SEO playbook. That’s exactly the gap an AI consultant for small business should be closing for you, checking what gets cited in your specific industry rather than applying a generic template.
A real example: the gifting client
One of my clients runs a corporate gifting company in Surrey. Her site was beautifully built, lovely photography, a warm founder story on the homepage in the style of the sort of narrative Airbnb built its early brand around (I’ve written before about how Airbnb’s marketing strategy leaned on story over spec sheets, and it worked brilliantly for them because their category needed trust before anything else). Her category doesn’t need that first. It needs a price.
We rewrote her “how much do branded corporate gifts cost” page. Old version opened with two paragraphs about her company’s values. New version opened with a bolded answer: prices from £8 per item for branded pens up to £85 for premium hampers, minimum order 25 units, turnaround 10 working days. Within three weeks, Perplexity was citing that page for prompts like “corporate gift ideas UK pricing.” She had four enquiries in the following month that opened with some version of “I asked ChatGPT and it mentioned you.” That’s not a huge number, but for a business her size, four warm enquiries that arrive already knowing your rough pricing is worth more than fifty cold ones.
Where this fits with the rest of your marketing
This isn’t a replacement for the basics, it sits on top of them. You still need an email list that converts, and if you haven’t looked at how Mailchimp built its own marketing strategy around useful free content, it’s worth studying, because the same instinct (be useful before you ask for anything) is what gets you cited by an AI too. You still need social proof; a strong Instagram marketing strategy builds the trust that makes someone act on an AI recommendation instead of scrolling past it. And you still need a clear, specific offer. I go back to Alex Hormozi’s approach to this constantly, and the business lessons from Alex Hormozi around making your offer so clear a stranger could repeat it back to you apply directly here. An AI model is, in effect, that stranger repeating your offer back to a customer. If your offer isn’t clear on the page, it can’t repeat it.
What to do this week
- Pick your three highest-traffic pages and rewrite the opening two sentences of each to directly answer the question the page targets.
- Add one real number to each page: a price, a timeframe, a percentage, anything concrete.
- Add a five-question FAQ block to the bottom of your best-performing blog post, not a new page.
- Search your own business name plus “review” or “cost” or “alternative” in ChatGPT and Perplexity and see what comes back. If it’s wrong or thin, that’s your starting point.
- Update one old page this week rather than writing a new one. Freshness signals matter more here than they ever did for classic SEO.
Free resource: The Exit-Intent Offer Swipe File.
Frequently asked questions
Can I pay to get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?
No, not directly. There’s no ad product for AI answers the way there is for Google search ads. The only route in is having pages so specific and clearly structured that the model pulls from them naturally. Anyone guaranteeing a placement for a monthly fee is selling something they can’t control.
Does this replace SEO?
No. Good SEO habits, clear headings, fast pages, genuine answers to real questions, are largely the same habits that get you cited by AI tools. Think of it as SEO with a stricter test attached: does this page answer the question in the first two sentences with a real number in it.
How long does it take to see a change?
In my test, the fastest result was three weeks after rewriting a single high-intent page. Most pages took longer, four to eight weeks, and some never got picked up at all, usually the ones still written as brand storytelling rather than direct answers.
Is it worth writing a whole new FAQ page for this?
Based on what I tracked over six weeks, no. A standalone FAQ page performed worse than a short FAQ block added to the bottom of an ordinary blog post that was already getting traffic. The context around the answer seems to matter as much as the answer itself.
Related reading: Your Google Traffic Is Falling Even Though You Rank Number One, and Nobody’s Explaining Why and AI Tool Costs Explained for Business Owners in 2026.
The quickest way to find out is to see whether AI recommends you, which runs the questions past five AI engines and tells you plainly whether you are named.
