How to get your business cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini

A growing share of buyers now open ChatGPT or Perplexity instead of Google when they want a shortlist. 'Best interior designers in Pune' typed into an AI assistant returns three or four names and a short reason for each. If you are not one of them, you never entered the consideration set — and unlike Google, there is no page two to be on.

SEO, AEO and GEO are three different jobs

• SEO wins the search result — a blue link on a page of blue links.
• AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) wins the extracted answer — the snippet the engine reads out instead of the link.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) wins the recommendation inside a generated response.

They overlap but they are not the same, and the third one behaves least like classical SEO. Analyses of AI citations consistently find that a large share of cited pages do not rank in the top ten on Google for the same query. Ranking helps, but it is not the gate.

Write answer capsules, not essays

The pattern that shows up repeatedly in AI-cited content: state the question as a heading, then answer it immediately in roughly 40 to 60 self-contained words, with no links inside the answer. Then support it with a specific figure and name the source. Everything else on the page can be as long as you like.

Structured data is how a machine knows what you are

Organization, LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService, FAQPage, Service and Article markup are not a ranking trick. They are the difference between a model inferring what you do from prose and being told. Get the entity right — name, area served, services, contact — and be consistent everywhere it appears.

The part nobody wants to hear: corroboration

This is where most AEO advice stops being useful. Assistants weight what they can verify from sources that are not you. A page on your own domain saying you are the best interior marketing agency in Pune is a claim. The same statement inferable from a directory listing, a review profile, a podcast mention and a client's own site is a fact as far as the model is concerned.

• A verified Google Business Profile with real reviews.
• Directory presence — Clutch, GoodFirms, Sortlist, Justdial, Sulekha. Unglamorous and effective.
• Mentions on sites you do not control: local press, partner blogs, client case studies, podcast appearances.
• Consistent name, address and phone everywhere. Inconsistency splits the entity in two.

An llms.txt file helps, but it is a hint

Publishing an llms.txt describing your business gives crawlers a clean summary. It is worth twenty minutes. It is not an index, and no assistant is obliged to believe it. Treat it as a label on the box, not the contents.

How to know if it is working

Stop guessing and start asking. Write down the ten questions a buyer would actually type — 'marketing agency for interior designers in Pune', 'who runs Meta ads for dental clinics in India' — and run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini once a month. Log who gets named. That list is your real competitive set, and it is usually not the one you assumed.