How to Get Your Brand Cited by ChatGPT: A Founder's Checklist
Ask ChatGPT about your company by name and it'll probably find you. Ask it for "the best [what you do] for [who you serve]" and you're probably not in the answer.
That second question is the one that matters. It's what your buyers type when they don't know you yet, and more and more of them are asking an AI tool before they ever open Google.
Getting into those answers is called generative engine optimization (GEO). Under the hood it's mostly good SEO, done with more discipline. AI tools cite pages they can reach, understand and trust. Here's the checklist I use, including what I found when I ran it on my own site.
The 7-point checklist
Let the AI crawlers in. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you see Disallow: / under GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, those tools can't read your site. Some website builders have a one-click "block AI crawlers" setting. Check whether it's on, and whether you meant it to be.
Give every page its own title. The page title is the first thing a search engine or AI tool reads. If your blog posts all share one generic title, every article looks like the same page. Each title should say what the page is about, plus your name or brand.
Tell machines who you are. Add structured data (schema markup): a small block of code that says "this is a person/company, this is what they do, these are their credentials, here are their other profiles." Most platforms let you paste it into a header code field. It's the difference between being a website and being an entity.
Answer questions the way people ask them. Use real questions as headings ("How much does a fractional CMO cost?"), then answer in the first two sentences. AI tools lift clear, self-contained answers. They skip throat-clearing.
Name your thinking. A named framework or method is easy to cite and easy to attribute to you. A generic tip belongs to everyone; a named framework belongs to you.
Show proof, not adjectives. Numbers, before-and-afters, specific client outcomes (anonymized is fine). "We helped a SaaS company grow" is invisible. "Revenue up 3x in 18 months" gets quoted.
Be consistent everywhere. Your website, LinkedIn, directory listings and speaker bios should describe you the same way. AI tools cross-check sources. Conflicting bios (different years of experience, old titles) make them less confident about you, so they cite you less.
Bonus: add an llms.txt file. It's a short plain-text summary of your site written for AI tools. It's new and not every tool reads it yet, but it takes ten minutes.
What I found when I ran this on my own site
I ran this checklist on beccagrieb.com. Cobbler's children, and all that. Here's what turned up:
AI search knew my name but not my category. My platform's AI visibility check showed I came up in 6 of 6 prompts that used my name, and 0 of 6 that didn't. That's the gap this whole checklist is about.
Every blog post had the same title. One setting meant 70+ articles all looked like a single page called "Fractional CMO Blog." Years of writing, mostly invisible as individual answers.
No profile markup. My site told search engines about my agency, but nothing said who I am, what I've done or where else to find me.
FAQs that machines couldn't read. Six good questions and answers on my homepage, with no markup to flag them as questions and answers.
Private details in public code. My site's behind-the-scenes business data included a street address I didn't want published.
None of these were hard to fix. Most took minutes. But none of them would have shown up in a quick look at the homepage.
One more lesson: an outside tool told me AI crawlers were blocked. My actual robots.txt file said they weren't. Always check the source before you act on a report, including one about your own site.
Quick answers
Is GEO different from SEO? Mostly no. The same basics apply: crawlable pages, clear titles, real expertise. GEO puts more weight on clear answers, structured data and consistency across the web, because AI tools summarize rather than list links.
How long does it take to show up in AI answers? Technical fixes get picked up when your pages are re-crawled, usually within weeks. Showing up for unbranded questions takes consistent, specific content over months.
Do I need a developer? For most of this, no. Titles, FAQs, llms.txt and consistent bios are all editable in a normal website builder. Structured data means pasting a block of code once.
Want a second set of eyes?
If you want to know how your brand shows up in AI search, and what's actually holding it back, book a strategy call. I'll tell you what I'd fix first.
