How To Get Your Business Mentioned By ChatGPT
Someone asks ChatGPT to recommend a marketing agency in Far North Queensland. It names three. You are not one of them.
Nothing is wrong with your business. The model just could not find enough it could trust to say about you.
This is fixable, and it is not the same job as ranking on Google. It has a name now. Answer engine optimisation, or AEO. Here is how it works and what to do about it.
What Getting Mentioned By ChatGPT Actually Means
Search engines send you a list of links. Answer engines write you a paragraph. When someone asks ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity or Microsoft Copilot a question, the model reads across many sources, decides what it trusts, and writes one answer. Your business is either in that answer or it is invisible.
How AI Search Decides What To Mention
Answer engines pull from training data and live retrieval, a fresh search run the moment you ask. What they reward is consistency and clarity. A business the model can describe confidently gets mentioned. A business it is unsure about gets left out, because the model would rather stay quiet than guess. Your job is to remove the guesswork.
The Seven Things That Make A Business Quotable
- The facts about you agree everywhere. Your name, what you do, where you are and how to reach you read the same on your site, your Google Business Profile, and every directory.
- Your site is readable by machines. Clean HTML, real headings, text that is actually text and not baked into images.
- You answer questions directly. Headings that match how people ask, followed by a plain answer in the first sentence.
- Your claims are specific and checkable. "We grew a client from 350 to 728 clicks a month" is quotable. "We deliver results" is not.
- Other credible sites mention you. Third-party agreement turns a claim into a fact.
- You publish structured data. Schema markup tells the model what it is reading.
- You have an llms.txt file. A short plain-text file that tells language models what you are and where the important pages live. Still rare, which is exactly why it helps.
How To Check Whether It Is Working
Ask the engines directly, then watch your traffic. Open ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity and ask the questions a customer would ask. Then watch your analytics for referral traffic from the AI tools. It is small today. It is growing, and the businesses building for it now are the ones the models will already know when it is not small.
Where This Sits Next To Normal SEO
AEO does not replace search engine optimisation. It sits on the same foundation. A site built to be found by Google, with clean structure, real content and honest proof, is most of the way to being quotable by an AI. Get found by people. Get quoted by the machines that people now ask. Same foundation, one more layer.
Is answer engine optimisation the same as SEO?
No. SEO earns you a ranking in a list of links. AEO earns you a mention inside an AI-written answer. They share a foundation, but AEO adds structured data, an llms.txt file and answer-shaped writing.
Can a small business get mentioned by ChatGPT?
Yes. Answer engines weigh trust and clarity more than size.
Do I need an llms.txt file?
It is not required, and most sites do not have one yet, which is why it helps. It takes an hour to write.
If getting found by the machines your customers now ask is your problem, start the conversation.