Somewhere today, a potential customer asked ChatGPT who they should buy from in your category. It gave them three names and its reasons. You'll never see the conversation, there's no ranking to check, and no ad you can buy to change it. But the answer isn't random, and it isn't fixed. Engines mention the businesses that are easiest to quote and safest to trust, and both of those are things you can build.
Here's the work, in the order it pays off.
First, fix what it says about you by name
Before you chase category questions, ask ChatGPT about your business directly. What it says comes from a small set of sources: your website, your key profiles, and a handful of third-party pages. If those are thin, outdated, or contradict each other, the answer will be too. Clean them up so the engines find one consistent story: what you do, who you do it for, where you are, what you charge. This is the fastest change you can make, usually visible within weeks, and the people asking about you by name are your warmest prospects. The full method is in The Brand Audit.
Publish direct answers to the questions that precede a purchase
ChatGPT and the other engines lift from pages that answer a question plainly, near the top, with specifics. Most businesses don't publish those pages. They publish capability statements, and a capability statement is unquotable. Work out the questions people ask before they buy in your category, then answer each one on its own page: real numbers, a clear position, no throat-clearing. Pricing questions are the best place to start, because almost nobody in your category will answer them and the engines have to cite someone. How to structure those pages is covered in Liftable Content.
Tell the machines who's talking
Engines weigh who wrote a page, not just what it says. That means named authors with real bios, a business that reads as a coherent entity across your site and profiles, and structured data that confirms it. None of this is glamorous work, and all of it is the difference between a page the engine trusts enough to quote and one it skims past. The mechanics are in How Answer Engines Choose Their Sources.
Get other people to say it
For category questions, the ones that matter most commercially, your own site can't do the job alone. Ask ChatGPT for "the best" anything and it builds the answer from third-party lists, reviews, directories, and articles, because a business calling itself the best is not evidence. This is the slow part: earning placements in the sources engines already lean on. It's also the part that compounds, because every credible mention corroborates every other one.
Measure it monthly, or you're guessing
Ask the engines your panel of real buyer questions every month, capture the answers verbatim, and track which ones name you. That's the whole measurement. Without it you're doing the work on faith; with it you can see which of the four jobs above needs the next month's effort. The method is in Building Your Question Panel.
Doing it yourself vs having it handled
Everything above is teachable, and we've published the entire method as a free book on this site, all fourteen chapters, no email gate. If you have the time, start there. If you'd rather have it handled, our Search and AI Visibility retainers run $2,000 to $10,000+ a month and cover Google and the answer engines as one job, with the verbatim evidence in your monthly report.
If the fit is right, let's talk.
FAQ
Can I pay ChatGPT to mention my business?
No. There's no placement to buy inside the answers. Mentions are earned through the sources the engines read: your site, your profiles, and credible third-party pages.
How long does it take to get mentioned by ChatGPT?
What it says about you by name can change within two to six weeks of fixing your source pages. Category recommendations, like "best in Melbourne" questions, typically take three to six months because they depend on third-party sources. The full timelines are in how long AEO takes to show results.
Does the same work cover Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews?
Yes. The engines differ in how they retrieve and weigh sources, but they all reward the same fundamentals: direct answers, clear authorship, consistent entity signals, and third-party corroboration.
What if ChatGPT says something wrong about my business?
Fix the sources, not the symptom. Wrong answers almost always trace back to outdated or conflicting information on your own site or your profiles. Correct those, and the answer follows on the next crawl.
