How to get cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Google's AI: a founder's guide to becoming the answer
When a founder tells me they already show up on Google when they search their own name, my first response is honest: good. Most people can’t even do that. Ranking for your own name is a real accomplishment, and if you have it, you should be proud of it.
Then I ask two questions.
First: when your name comes up, what actually shows up with it? What content, who made it, and do you control that narrative? Ranking for your name means very little if the story attached to it isn’t yours.
Second, and this is the big one: who is actually searching your name? The people who already know you. Every ideal client, partner, or collaborator who doesn’t know you yet is typing the problem they need solved into Google, ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity. They’re looking for the answer, the fix, the best person to help.
So the real question is “do you own your category?” When someone asks AI about the problem you solve, does it cite you? Most experts are findable by name and invisible on the topics that matter. Closing that gap, connecting your name to the answer people are actually asking for, is the entire game. It’s literally why we named our system AuthorityOS.
This guide is how we do it.
What GEO, AEO and LLM SEO actually mean
If you’ve gone looking for how to get cited by AI, you’ve run into a pile of acronyms. Generative engine optimization (GEO). Answer engine optimization (AEO). LLM SEO. AI search optimization. Different people coined them, and they all point at the same job: making sure that when an AI system answers a question in your field, it knows who you are, trusts you, and names you as a source.
I use AEO, because the goal is to be the answer. Call it whatever you like. The work underneath is the same, and it’s what the rest of this guide covers.
How AI search decides who to cite
For twenty years, getting found meant fighting for a keyword. You picked the phrase, you pumped as much content as you could into it, and you tried to convince a search engine your page was the best. That era is closing.
Search is changing shape. AI is layering itself into every place people ask, and it answers directly, with the sources it trusts most. Those answers are built from what AI can piece together and corroborate about you from across the whole internet. When I say “the machine” in the rest of this piece, that’s all I mean: AI, reading the internet and deciding who to trust.
It’s happening on two fronts at once. The frontier models, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, have pulled hundreds of millions of people into asking them directly. And every big platform your market already uses, Google, LinkedIn, YouTube, is building AI into its ecosystem, sometimes their own, sometimes straight from the frontier models. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are the most visible example. Wherever your market goes, there’s now an intelligence system between them and you.
Here’s how these models actually decide, because it changes what you do. They read the intent behind a question and work with the person to understand the real problem underneath. Then they go looking for the foremost authorities on that topic. They lean on credible sources: sites that have been around, that carry real credibility markers, that other trusted places point to. The space shifts constantly, but that instinct is baked in. The machine wants the trustworthy answer, from the trustworthy source, for what the person is actually trying to solve.
This is why your authority files and authority hubs matter so much: the databases and profiles AI trusts to tell it who you are. Getting those set up, built out well, and monitored is foundational. It’s a core part of what we do inside AuthorityOS.
The two gates: entity and content
Before AI can cite you, you have to clear two gates, in order.
Gate one is entity. Does the machine actually know who you are, as a real, credible person it can place with confidence? It learns that more from what the rest of the internet says about you than from your own website.
Gate two is content. Once it knows you, can it pull a clear answer out of you? Your actual expertise, in a form it can lift and attribute back to you. And here’s the flip side of gate one: your website is weak proof of who you are, and it’s the strongest home for what you know.
I agree with the people saying AEO is about what others say about you. But I want to add the part that gets missed: you have real influence over that. You can produce and shape those third-party signals. The good news underneath all of this is that it’s buildable, deliberately. You cannot fake it and you cannot game it, but you can build it.
Where ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google’s AI find you
Here’s where most advice falls apart. People treat this as one-dimensional, as if it all happens on your website. We’re in a multi-surface world now, with models that can search, crawl, compute, compile, analyze, and synthesize at a speed we’ve never seen. Your answer gets built across many surfaces at once, and you need the right entity and content signals in all the right places.
That means the right platforms, with real substance, actually answering. You find which platforms by starting with the basics, before any tactics:
- Who are you?
- What is your solution?
- Who do you serve, exactly?
Then you go a level deeper into that ideal client. Where do they spend time online? What are they searching, and what are they asking AI? What are they commenting on? What’s the voice of that customer, what they think and also what they feel? You build a real map of that person: their behavior, their language, the exact words they use in AI search and everywhere else.
Once you have that map, the work gets systematic. When you truly know your customer, you know what to build, where to put it, and what content to make. First you make sure AI knows who the person is, that strong entity signal, through web content, the right social platforms, and a full build-out of authority files and hubs. Then you build the content that lets AI extract the right answers, and you place it where it counts: your website, and also LinkedIn, YouTube, podcast environments, and short-form clips on the platforms that already carry strong AI search. You cascade the right answers and the right authority signals out across the internet.
The human voice: the part most GEO advice misses
Here’s what I believe is truly missing from almost every conversation about this.
The human voice.
You’re always appealing to two audiences at once: the AI that now serves answers, and the humans those answers get served to. Most people optimize for the machine and forget the human, or they create for the human and never structure it for the machine. You’re far better off with a content format that feeds both.
That’s why I’m so convinced about answer-focused, conversational, video-first content. Set the system up right and AI knows who you are and can extract your exact answers, so you surface, get cited, and start owning your category. That’s the machine side handled.
But never forget the other side. That machine is surfacing you to a human, and the human is who matters. The human cares about the vehicle, the vessel, the medium you show up in. That’s why video-first wins: the machine doesn’t care about the video, but the human does. And conversational content is the best of all, because we build the answers straight out of real human conversation, in real human language. That resonates with the models and AI search, and it lands with the actual person your message needs to reach.
That’s the whole thesis.
How we actually build it
To put our process plainly, we’ve built a system for exactly this. We build territory maps and voice-of-customer maps. We work to understand precisely how the humans you want to reach are interacting with the internet and AI search: what they search, what they need, how they say it. We find where the demand actually is.
From there we reverse-engineer it. The data tells us what content to create, and it tells us where to put it so you carry strong entity signals and strong content signals in the right environments. And because it comes from real conversation, it holds the emotional and psychological weight that makes a person stop and pay attention.
The cause and effect is simple when you say it out loud: understand the people you want to reach and how they behave online, let that data define the content, then place that content where it builds your entity and answers their questions. Do that consistently, and you become the answer.
Run it as a living system
One warning: be wary of anyone selling you a checklist.
Earned and third-party media is incredibly important. In some dimensions it does outweigh your own content, and a strong entity signal needs earned media behind it. But it’s one part of the picture, and it doesn’t automatically outrank owned or paid for every brand. If you chased only earned media, you’d miss huge dimensions that matter just as much.
I think about this like an ecosystem. Look at a forest. It’s always in flux, always shifting and evolving, slowly, even when big events hit. Technology is moving fast, the frontier labs are moving fast, but the effect on the internet plays out a bit more slowly, and it keeps shifting. So you treat your content environments as a living system. Each one needs different things at different times. You plant seeds, you watch what happens, you harvest when you can. You look at it holistically and dial each dimension to what the real signals are telling you, and you let a headline you saw once stay a headline.
Take llms.txt as an example. I’m skeptical of it, honestly, because we haven’t seen enough real evidence that it moves anything with the big models yet. We just don’t know. And still, my advice is to build it and run it, because it costs you nothing and it might matter a lot later. That’s the posture: stay skeptical, hold the context, rule nothing out, and keep watching what actually produces results in the real world. I can thank my friend and creative partner Mark Berube for this approach, called Bayesian thinking.
Proof, from two normal business owners
Let me show you what this looks like, and on purpose I’m going to skip the big marquee shows.
I could show you the highlight reel. But the more useful proof is what happens for normal business owners.
Douglas Mark had barely done any content, in an industry most people would call unsexy. He had the foresight to know that content, communication, and community mattered. We did aggressive research on his customer, what they struggle with and what they search for, and we made conversational content around it, consistently, and put it in the right places. Douglas went from almost no online traction to being the name that shows up for franchise training and team training. AI search cites him. Google runs overviews and a knowledge panel on him. That came from podcast content, backed by real customer research, placed well.
Shannon Lantzy runs a small consultancy in medtech, again a quiet space. She stayed consistent, focused on her clients’ hopes, problems, and the answers they were looking for, and had the right conversations with the right people. We clipped that content down and got it into the right environments. Now when people search for the thinkers in medtech innovation, she ranks on the first page of Google, multiple times, going up against behemoths in medtech and pharma.
Neither of them is a celebrity (although they are in my eyes). They’re normal business owners who put the right system in place, answered the right questions, and made the right content. That’s the point. This is accessible to anyone willing to do that. Both are written up in our case studies if you want the details.
Why authenticity wins
I’ll leave you with the reason authenticity is the whole thing.
Every road here leads to a human. Yes, we build content so AI understands who you are and how you connect to the questions people ask. But the bots are not the ones who pay you. The humans are. There will be more crawlers and more machines pulling content around the internet, and you have to speak to them. But the destination is always a person looking for someone who can solve their problem.
That’s why you answer as a human, in your own voice. Authenticity wins because it’s human, it’s emotional, it’s psychological, and it’s what actually builds the relationships that grow a business. AI is just how the right human finds you.
Quick answers
How do I get cited by ChatGPT? Clear both gates. Make sure ChatGPT can confirm who you are from sources other than your own site (authority files, profiles, earned media, other people talking about you), then publish clear answers to the exact questions your market asks, in places it reads: your website, LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts. The same work applies to Claude, Perplexity and Gemini.
How do I show up in Google’s AI Overviews? The same two gates apply. Google’s AI pulls from pages it already trusts and can lift a clean answer from, so structure your content around real questions and answer each one directly, in your own words.
What’s the difference between GEO, AEO and SEO? SEO got you onto the list of links. GEO and AEO, two names for the same discipline, decide whether AI names you in the answer. Good SEO still helps, because AI leans on the same trust signals search engines built up over twenty years.
Does llms.txt help you get cited by AI? There isn’t enough evidence yet that the big models use it. It costs almost nothing to set up, so build it and keep watching.
Can you game your way into AI answers? You can’t fake it and you can’t game it. You can build it: a strong entity, clear answers, and real conversations placed where your market already asks.
Where you stand right now
If you want to know where you actually stand, that’s exactly what we do first. Every engagement at Future Media starts with an Authority Audit: we map what your market is actually searching for and asking AI, we show you where you show up today, and we score the gap. You’ll see, specifically, whether you own your category or whether you’re findable by name and invisible on the topics that matter. It’s how we both figure out if we’re a good fit to work together, and the intelligence is yours to keep either way.
