No agency can guarantee that ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or any other AI tool will recommend your business. These tools produce answers from what they have learned and from pages they can read at the time, and each decides for itself what to include. Anyone promising a guaranteed position is guessing.
What you do control is how clear, consistent and easy to verify your own information is, and how often credible sources mention you. Both are worth improving whichever tools your customers use, and both also help ordinary search.
The details vary by tool and change often, but a few things hold in general.
Use the words a customer would type. State your services, who they are for, where you work and how to get in touch, near the top of your home page and on a clear about page. Vague slogans and clever phrases give an AI tool nothing to quote.
A good test: could someone who has never heard of you read your home page and repeat, in one sentence, what you do and who you do it for?
Pages that answer specific questions, such as what a service includes, how it works, who it suits and what to expect, are the pages that get cited. Collect real questions from sales calls, emails and WhatsApp chats and answer them on your site.
A clear FAQ helps both people and machines, as long as the answers are true and match what you actually do. Do not write answers just to catch searches.
Schema markup describes your business, services, articles and FAQs in a format software can read without guessing. It does not guarantee anything, but it removes ambiguity about who you are and what you offer.
Two rules matter. Only mark up what is visible on the page, and keep it accurate. Marking up claims you cannot support can harm trust.
Use the same business name, email, phone number, description and service area across your website, your Google Business Profile, social profiles and any directory. Conflicting or outdated details make it harder for any system to be sure it is talking about one business.
Reviews, case studies, directory listings, interviews and articles that mention you carry weight because they come from outside your own site. Real client results, published with permission, are among the strongest signals you can create.
Do not buy fake reviews or fabricate case studies. They can be detected, they can harm your reputation, and they can break platform rules.
Check that your robots file does not block the search and AI crawlers you want to read the site, that pages load quickly, and that important content is real text rather than locked inside images, PDFs or heavy scripts.
Some sites also publish a plain-text summary file called llms.txt. It is optional, and there is no confirmation that every AI tool uses it, but it is cheap to add and does no harm.
Out-of-date prices, services or contact details get repeated by tools that read them. Review your key pages on a regular schedule, and update facts as soon as they change.
You can learn a lot in an hour, with no special tools.
Treat results as a rough indicator rather than a ranking. The same question can produce different answers on different days.
The fundamentals overlap a great deal: clear content, fast and crawlable pages, and trust signals from other sites. AI answers put more weight on being easy to summarise and verify, so plain language and consistent facts matter even more.
Not in the sense of buying a place in an answer. Some platforms have advertising, which is separate and labelled. Organic mentions come from being clear, credible and widely referenced.
It is an emerging convention and there is no confirmation that all AI tools read it. It costs little to add, so it is reasonable to include, but do not rely on it.
Improvements to your own pages can be read quickly, but building mentions and reviews takes months. Track changes monthly rather than expecting overnight results.
Visibility inside AI search is one of the services on our Market pillar. If you would like us to look at how your business appears today, get in touch. You can also read our guide to the growth audit, which includes search and AI visibility.