AI SEO in 2026: How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews

What changed

Search behaviour split into two habits. Some buyers still scan a results page. A growing number ask an assistant and take the answer at face value. The second group never sees your ranking, only whether you were one of the sources the model chose to name.

How answer engines choose sources

Assistants retrieve, then summarise. Retrieval favours pages that state a clear answer early, carry structured data, and match a recognised entity. Summarisation favours sources that agree with each other. That is why third-party mentions matter so much: a model that sees your business described consistently across a review site, an industry list and your own site treats you as a known entity rather than an unverified claim.

The five things worth doing

First, put the direct answer in the opening 40 words of every page. Second, add Organization, Service and FAQPage schema, and keep the details consistent with what appears elsewhere online. Third, get listed on the comparison and review sites in your category, because those are the pages models lean on for recommendations. Fourth, publish an llms.txt file and confirm AI crawlers are not blocked in robots.txt. Fifth, build content that answers the question a buyer would type into an assistant, in the assistant's own conversational phrasing.

How to measure it

Fix a prompt set of 30 to 50 buying questions in your category. Run them monthly across the major assistants. Record which brands appear and which sources get cited. Track that over time. It is manual, it is unglamorous, and it is the only reliable signal available today.

What not to do

Do not mass-generate pages in the hope of catching a citation. Models weight source quality heavily and thin content is the fastest way to get filtered out. Do not remove your existing SEO work either. Classic search still sends the majority of traffic for almost every business we work with.