For a while, an AI assistant was telling people that InLinks, an SEO software company, had been acquired by Semrush. It hadn't. Jojo Furnival told the story on Medium to make a simple point: these tools are now the first place a lot of people meet a brand, and the brand has no idea what was said.
That's the situation for most companies right now. Someone asks ChatGPT for the best options in your category, gets a short list with a sentence on each, and decides who to look at next. You never see that conversation. You only see the visitors who make it to your site, if they do.
Most advice on this topic jumps straight to "how to get cited." I'd start one step earlier. Find out what these assistants already say about you, work out where they got it, fix what's wrong at the source, and then make sure the people who do click through land on a page that matches what they were just told. That's the whole plan, and the first step takes twenty minutes.
01Ask the questions your buyers ask, and write down the answers
Open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini in fresh chats, with memory off if you can, so your own history doesn't color the answers. Then ask the questions a buyer would ask before choosing you. Swap in your own company, category and competitors:
- What does [company] do, and who is it for?
- What are the best [category] options for [your typical customer]?
- [Company] or [main competitor]: which should I choose, and why?
- How much does [company] cost?
- What do people complain about with [company]?
- What are the alternatives to [company]?
Question 2 matters most, because it's the one where you're not named in the prompt. If you don't show up there, the others are mostly a vanity check.
Ask each question twice. Answers move between runs and between tools, and one good answer can be luck. Log everything in a table like this one:
| Question | Assistant | What it said | Accurate? | Who else it named | Sources it cited |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best [category] for [customer] | ChatGPT | ||||
| Best [category] for [customer] | Perplexity | ||||
| [Company] vs [competitor] | ChatGPT |
When you're done, you'll usually find three kinds of problems: things that are wrong (an old price, a feature you dropped, a market you left), things that are missing (you're absent from the shortlist, or described in one vague line), and things that are someone else's opinion presented as fact, often a two-year-old forum thread. Each has a different fix.
02The answer comes from two places, and they change at different speeds
The first is what the model learned during training: a blurry, averaged memory of everything written about you up to a certain date. It's why an assistant can describe your company in confident detail without linking to anything. It's also slow to change. A pivot you made last spring may not exist yet as far as that memory is concerned.
The second is what the tool looks up live when it searches the web before answering. That's where the links come from, and it's the part you can influence this quarter.
So which pages does the live layer read? Ahrefs tracks the domains ChatGPT cites most. In its September 2026 data for the US, Reddit comes first with 16.8% of citations, Wikipedia second with 7.0%, followed by review and comparison sites like Consumer Reports and Forbes. Your own website matters, but a lot of what gets said about you is assembled from what other people wrote: forum threads, "best tools for X" lists, review pages, directory profiles.
That's good news, oddly. It means most of the problems from your audit have an address.
03Fix each problem where it lives
Go back to your audit table and sort the problems by type.
Wrong facts: correct them at the source. Look at the sources column. If an assistant keeps quoting an outdated price, the old number usually lives somewhere: a directory profile, a review site listing, a two-year-old comparison article. Update what you control, and ask the authors of what you don't. Then make sure your own site states the current fact plainly, on a page a crawler can read without clicking through three tabs.
Vague or missing descriptions: give them one sentence to repeat. Assistants paraphrase whatever is said most consistently. Write one plain sentence about what you do and who it's for, and use it word for word on your homepage, your About page, LinkedIn, and every directory and marketplace profile you have. If five pages describe you five different ways, the model will average them into something nobody recognizes.
Absent from the shortlist: go where the lists are made. If question 2 returned your competitors and not you, check which pages it cited. They're often "best [category]" roundups, review platforms and forum threads. Getting onto those lists, collecting reviews where your buyers already look, and answering questions in communities as yourself (with your name on it) does more than another blog post on your own domain.
Unanswered questions: answer them on your site. If nobody can find how your pricing works or how you compare to the obvious alternative, the assistant will fill the gap with whatever it finds. A clear pricing page, an honest comparison page and a real FAQ give it something better to quote.
Then run the audit again next quarter. The live layer can shift within weeks. The trained memory takes longer, so don't panic if the old description lingers for a while.
04The visitor from ChatGPT has already heard your pitch
Here's the part almost nobody writes about. The people who do click through from an AI answer arrive in a very particular state. They've read a summary of you, probably next to two or three competitors, and they've already half-decided. They're coming to check.
That makes them valuable. Ahrefs looked at its own numbers in June 2025: visitors from AI search made up 0.5% of its traffic and 12.1% of its signups. A small crowd, with a lot of intent.
It also changes what your page needs to do. Someone arriving from a Google search wants to understand what you are. Someone arriving from ChatGPT already has an answer to that, and wants to confirm it or correct it. Three things help:
- Match the summary in the first screen. If assistants describe you as, say, "a project management tool for small agencies," those words, or very close ones, should be the first thing the visitor reads. Recognition beats cleverness here.
- Answer the comparison they just read. They were shown alternatives. A short, fair "how we're different from X" section saves them a trip back to the chat.
- Make the next step obvious. They came to verify, and they're close to deciding. Don't make them hunt for the demo, the price or the contact form.
To see which pages these visitors land on, filter your analytics by referral source: ChatGPT usually tags its links with utm_source=chatgpt.com, and Perplexity shows up as perplexity.ai. Start with whichever page gets the most of them.
You'll never sit in on the conversation, but you can make sure the room is ready when they walk in.
