How to Get Cited by ChatGPT and Google AI

By Adrian Huber, CEO of Corient, a B2B marketing agency in Sydney.

Your next customer may shortlist you before they ever visit your website. They will ask ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode something like "best onboarding tool for a 20-person SaaS team in Australia", read one synthesised answer, and click on one or two of the brands it names. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of becoming one of those names.

It isn't a replacement for SEO. It's SEO with a different scoreboard: being cited and recommended, not just ranked. This guide is for founder-led Australian and NZ brands without a full marketing team, and ends with a 90-day plan.

Key takeaways

• Google says there are no special requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Your page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, so GEO starts with SEO fundamentals, not new files or schema tricks.
• ChatGPT search can't cite pages its crawler is blocked from. Check robots.txt and your CDN's bot settings this week.
• In Ahrefs' study of 75,000 brands, web mentions of a brand tracked AI visibility far more closely than backlinks or page count.
• In the original GEO research, adding citations, quotations and statistics lifted visibility in AI answers by 30–40%. Keyword stuffing did little or nothing.
• Measure it three ways: AI referrals in GA4, a fixed set of buyer prompts tested monthly, and asking new leads how they found you.

What is generative engine optimisation?

Generative engine optimisation is the practice of making your brand and content easy for AI answer engines to find, understand, trust and cite.

The term comes from a 2023 research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues, with authors from Princeton among others, published at KDD 2024. They tested how changes to a page affect its visibility inside AI-generated answers and found GEO methods could boost visibility by up to 40%.

In practice, GEO is two separate jobs:

1. Be retrievable. The AI system has to be able to crawl and index your page, and pull it when it searches the web to ground an answer.
2. Be chosen. Among the pages it pulls, yours has to be the clearest and most specific source. And your brand has to be one the wider web already links to the topic.

Keep the two apart, because the fixes are different.

Why does AI search matter for Australian founders now?

Because the click is shrinking and the answer is growing.

• AI Mode is here. Google rolled out AI Mode in Australia, in English, on 8 October 2025. It says early testers asked queries nearly three times as long as traditional searches.
• Fewer people click. Pew Research Center analysed March 2025 browsing data from 900 US adults. When Google showed an AI summary, users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% when there was no summary. They clicked a link inside the summary in just 1% of visits.
• Top rankings earn less. Ahrefs' updated study found an AI Overview now correlates with a 58% lower click-through rate for the top-ranking page, based on December 2025 data.
• ChatGPT is a mainstream search tool. At DevDay in late September 2026, OpenAI said ChatGPT reaches more than 1.2 billion people a week, as reported by The Decoder.

Most of this data is US or global, not Australian. The direction is what matters: fewer clicks, and more of the shortlist decided before a buyer reaches you.

There is an upside. In ChartMogul's 2026 conversion research, Webflow's ChatGPT traffic converted at 24%, six times its Google rate. One company, not a benchmark, but it makes sense: a visitor an AI has already shortlisted you for is further along.

How do ChatGPT and Google AI Mode choose which brands to cite?

Neither company publishes the full selection logic. What they do publish is enough to act on.

Google AI Mode and AI Overviews. Google's guidance for site owners says both may use "query fan-out", running several related searches across subtopics to build one response. To be shown as a supporting link, a page "must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet". Google says there are no additional technical requirements, and you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema. Your classic search visibility is the entry ticket.

ChatGPT search. OpenAI's crawler documentation says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers", though they can still appear as plain navigational links. GPTBot, which collects training data, is a separate setting. You can allow search and block training.

What correlates with being named. Ahrefs analysed 75,000 brands across ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews:

• YouTube mentions of the brand: ~0.74 (strongest)
• Branded web mentions: 0.66–0.71
• Branded search volume: 0.35–0.47
• Number of pages on the site: ~0.19 (almost none)

Ahrefs is clear that correlation isn't causation. But the pattern holds across all three platforms: AI systems tend to name brands the rest of the web already talks about.

So here is the working model. Search indexes decide whether you can be retrieved. The clarity of your content decides whether you are quoted. Your reputation off your own site decides whether you are recommended.

Step 1: Can AI crawlers actually reach your site?

Start here. It is the only step that can take your visibility to zero.

• Check robots.txt. Open yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt. Make sure no rule blocks OAI-SearchBot or Googlebot, including a catch-all wildcard.
• Check your CDN and security settings. Bot protection can block AI crawlers without anyone deciding to. OpenAI publishes its crawler IP ranges so your developer can allow them.
• Keep content in text. Google's list of best practices includes making sure important content is available as text. Pricing hidden in an image, or a case study locked in a PDF, is hard for any system to quote.
• Confirm indexing. Use Google Search Console to check your key pages are indexed. A page that isn't indexed can't be a supporting link in AI Mode.
• Decide on training separately. Blocking GPTBot doesn't remove you from ChatGPT search. Blocking OAI-SearchBot does.

Step 2: How do you write pages AI can quote?

AI answers are built from passages. Make yours easy to lift.

The GEO researchers tested nine ways of rewriting content. The top three were adding citations to credible sources, adding quotations and adding statistics. Each lifted visibility by 30–40% on their main measure. Making text more fluent and easier to read helped by 15–30%. Keyword stuffing offered "little to no improvement".

One finding matters for smaller brands. Citing sources lifted visibility by 115% for pages ranked fifth in the underlying search results, while top-ranked pages lost ground on average. In the researchers' tests, at least, clarity and evidence could beat incumbency.

Turn that into page rules:

• Instead of: A slow introduction before the point. Write: A one- or two-sentence direct answer under every question heading.
• Instead of: "We help businesses grow". Write: "We run paid ads and email for founder-led SaaS brands in Australia and NZ".
• Instead of: "Most customers see great results". Write: One specific, sourced number with a link to the source.
• Instead of: A long paragraph comparing options. Write: A comparison table with clear row and column labels.
• Instead of: Headings like "Our approach". Write: Headings phrased the way buyers ask: "How much does X cost in Australia?".
• Instead of: Different prices on different pages. Write: One consistent set of facts: pricing, locations, services, team.

Add a named author, a "last updated" date and an FAQ section. Then give your sales pages the same treatment, because comparison and "best for" answers lean on product and pricing pages. Our guide to the anatomy of a high-converting B2B sales page covers the structure.

Step 3: How do you build the reputation AI systems trust?

If brand mentions track AI visibility this closely, your off-site footprint is part of your content strategy.

• Get reviewed where your category is compared. For B2B software, that's G2 and Capterra. For apps, it's App Store and Google Play reviews. For premium consumer brands, it's stockists, gift guides and press. One participant in the ChartMogul survey said investing in G2 "lifted all channels", and the report notes that LLMs frequently cite G2 data.
• Show up where AI looks. Pew found Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit were the most-cited sources in Google's AI summaries. Answer questions in your category's subreddits as a named founder, and put your best explanations on video.
• Put the founder on other people's platforms. Podcasts, YouTube interviews and guest articles create mentions that link your name to the problem you solve.
• Keep your entity data consistent. Google tells site owners to keep Business Profile and Merchant Center information up to date. Do the same with LinkedIn, directories and partner pages: same name, same description, same category.

Step 4: Does structured data or llms.txt help?

Structured data helps machines understand your page. It doesn't buy citations.

Google's guidance is direct: no special schema is needed for AI features, and your structured data should match the visible text. Use the standard types where they're accurate: Organization, Article, FAQPage, Product and LocalBusiness.

On llms.txt, Google says you don't need AI text files for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Other tools may read one, so add it after the work above, not instead of it.

How do you measure AI visibility?

You can't manage what you can't see, and AI visibility is only partly visible. Use three lenses together.

• AI referrals. Where: GA4 custom channel group for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com. What to watch: Sessions, enquiries and trial sign-ups from AI sources.
• Google search. Where: Search Console, Performance report, "Web" search type. What to watch: Impressions and clicks on question-style queries.
• Prompt testing. Where: A spreadsheet of 20–30 real buyer prompts, run monthly in ChatGPT, AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity. What to watch: Mentioned or not, cited or not, and which competitors appear.

Two details help. OpenAI adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to ChatGPT search referrals, so those visits are easy to isolate. And Google counts AI Overviews and AI Mode inside the normal "Web" figures in Search Console, so you can't split them out cleanly there.

Finally, add "an AI tool like ChatGPT" to your "How did you hear about us?" field. It catches buyers who read an AI answer, then searched your name directly.

A 90-day generative engine optimisation plan

This follows the Build, Prove, Scale framework we use for every channel: fix the foundations, prove one thing works, then put more behind it.

Build (days 1–30)

• Fix crawl access, indexing and any text locked in images or PDFs.
• Rewrite your 5–10 most commercial pages with direct answers, specific facts and clear headings.
• Set up the GA4 AI channel group and run your first prompt test as a baseline.

Prove (days 31–60)

• Publish or refresh four to six question-led articles on your highest-intent topics.
• Earn three to five credible third-party mentions: reviews, a podcast, a guest article, a directory listing.
• Re-run the prompt test. Compare AI-referred leads with your other channels on lead quality, not just volume.

Scale (days 61–90)

• Do more of the formats and topics that earned citations, and stop the ones that didn't.
• Build a steady review programme and a simple video habit.
• Bring GEO into your monthly reporting next to paid and organic search.

If your site leaks the visitors it already gets, fix that first. AI-referred buyers arrive with high intent, and a weak page wastes them. Our list of five conversion leaks on B2B websites is a quick audit.

What doesn't work?

• Keyword stuffing. The GEO research found it offered little to no improvement.
• Mass-producing AI-written pages. In Ahrefs' data, page count had almost no relationship with AI visibility. Google's spam policies also cover scaled content abuse.
• Guaranteed AI rankings. No one controls what these systems say. Be wary of promises.
• Treating it as a one-off project. AI answers change as the web changes, so make it a monthly habit.

The bottom line

Generative engine optimisation isn't a discipline with secret rules. It's good SEO, written to be quoted and backed by a reputation beyond your own website. The brands AI recommends are the ones that are easy to crawl, clear on the page and talked about elsewhere. Founder-led businesses can compete on all three, often faster than larger competitors that are slow to change.

Frequently asked questions

What is generative engine optimisation?

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of making your brand and content easy for AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Google AI Mode and Perplexity to find, quote and recommend. It builds on SEO. Your pages still need to be crawlable and indexed, but the goal is to be cited in the answer, not just ranked under it.

Is GEO different from SEO?

It is SEO with a different scoreboard. Google says the same SEO best practices apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no extra technical requirements. The difference is emphasis: GEO puts more weight on direct, quotable answers, sourced statistics and off-site brand mentions. It also measures citations and AI referrals, not just rankings.

How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?

Make sure OAI-SearchBot isn't blocked in your robots.txt or by your CDN, because OpenAI says opted-out sites won't be shown in ChatGPT search answers. Then publish pages that answer buyer questions directly with specific, sourced facts. Build mentions of your brand on review sites, in industry media, on podcasts and on YouTube.

Do I need llms.txt or special schema to appear in Google AI Mode?

No. Google says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema.org markup to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet. Structured data is still useful if it matches the visible text on the page.

How long does generative engine optimisation take to work?

Crawl fixes can register quickly. OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to flow through to ChatGPT search. Content and reputation work takes longer, so plan on a 90-day cycle: fix access and key pages in month one, publish and earn mentions in month two, then scale what earned citations in month three. No one can guarantee AI citations.

How do I track traffic from ChatGPT and other AI tools?

In GA4, create a custom channel group for AI referrers such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com and copilot.microsoft.com. OpenAI adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to ChatGPT search referrals. Pair that with a monthly test of a fixed list of buyer prompts, and ask new leads whether an AI tool recommended you.

Want this built, proven and scaled for you? Corient works as a full marketing department for founder-led brands: a CMO, design, copy, paid ads, email and automation, and web and tech, run on Build, Prove, Scale. We'll start with the foundations in this article, then prove one channel before scaling anything. Your first month is free.