How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT and Perplexity?

1. Check you are not accidentally blocking them

Every website has a small settings file telling automated visitors what they may read. AI assistants each arrive under their own name — OpenAI’s, Anthropic’s, Perplexity’s, Google’s — and a blanket “no robots” rule written years ago quietly shuts all of them out at once.

Check this before anything else. Nothing else you do matters while it is wrong, and a surprising number of businesses are blocking themselves without knowing it.

2. Answer the question before you make the argument

Put a complete answer in the first paragraph under the heading. AI assistants quote a passage, not a whole page, and a paragraph that only makes sense if you have read the three before it cannot be quoted at all.

3. Be one business, not three

If you are “Smith & Sons” on your website, “Smith and Sons Ltd” in your listings, and “smithandsons.co.uk” in your own writing, you have quietly split yourself into three half-recognised businesses instead of one well-known one. Pick the version of your name you want, and use exactly that everywhere.

4. Give them a map

You can publish a short, plain list of your most useful pages at a standard address on your site, so an AI assistant does not have to work out your structure by wandering around it. It is a signpost, not a magic trick — it will not help if the pages themselves are blocked or missing from Google.

5. Expect to measure it yourself

Google’s own tools do not tell you when ChatGPT mentions you. What you can see is which AI systems visited your site and which pages they read, plus anyone who arrived from one. That is the closest anyone can currently get, and it is more than most providers will show you.