How to get your business cited by ChatGPT and AI answers

By Jo van Vuuren — Fractional CMO

There’s no lever marked “get cited by AI”. What there is, is a set of practical, unglamorous steps that make a business easier for an AI system to find, understand and trust enough to quote. Most of them are also just good publishing practice, which is a useful sign they’re worth doing regardless of how any one AI tool changes next. None of them require a technical team or a big budget; they require a business to be clear about what it does and disciplined about how it says it.

Answer the real question, directly and early

Generative tools favour content that gives the answer plainly, near the top, phrased the way someone would actually ask it. Bury the answer under three paragraphs of scene-setting and a system is more likely to synthesise around you than quote you.

• Open each key page or section with the direct answer, then explain and support it afterwards.
• Write headings as the actual questions people ask, not clever titles.
• Answer one question per section: mixed answers are harder for a system to extract cleanly.

Structure content so it’s extractable

AI systems parse content, they don’t admire it. A page that reads beautifully but has no real structure is harder to lift from than a plainer page that’s properly organised.

• Use genuine heading hierarchy (H2s, H3s) instead of bold text pretending to be headings.
• Keep paragraphs short and answers concise: a few sentences a system could quote whole.
• Use lists and tables wherever information is naturally list-shaped.
• Add an FAQ section that mirrors the exact questions your customers actually ask.

Build entity clarity and authority

Before a system quotes you, it has to work out who you are and whether to trust you. That’s an entity problem as much as a content one.

• Describe your name, your offer and your audience the same way everywhere: your site, directories and social profiles.
• Show real expertise (named authors, credentials, a track record) rather than anonymous corporate copy.
• Get named or linked to by other credible sites; showing up on other people's authoritative pages is one of the clearer trust signals a system can check.
• Keep key facts (services, sectors, location) current: stale or contradictory information undermines trust.

Use structured data

Schema markup doesn’t force a citation, but it gives machines an unambiguous, machine-readable version of what your page already says, which lowers the odds of being misread or skipped. It’s a small technical step that supports everything else on the list without replacing any of it.

• Organization schema: states your identity, your offer and your location in a format machines can parse directly.
• FAQPage schema: flags your FAQ content as structured question-and-answer pairs.
• Article schema: marks up guides and blog content with clear authorship and dates.

Be the source actually worth quoting

The steps above help a system find and parse your content. None of them substitute for the content being genuinely useful: a specific, honest, well-informed answer that a person would also value. That combination (structurally easy to lift, and substantively worth lifting) is what makes a page a plausible citation rather than one of thousands saying the same generic thing.

Start with the handful of questions your customers ask most often, and make sure your site answers each one clearly, in one place, better than anyone else bothers to. Revisit those pages periodically, because AI systems favour content that’s current, and a page left untouched for a couple of years starts to look less trustworthy than one that’s obviously maintained.