How to get your startup cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity: an honest checklist

"How to rank in ChatGPT" is one of the fastest-growing search phrases in marketing, and it attracts a lot of overconfident advice. The truth is simpler: no one controls what a language model cites, and anyone who guarantees it is selling something. You can, however, make your site easier to find, understand and trust. That is what this checklist covers.

What the research says

The best-known study is GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, published at KDD 2024 by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi. It proposed treating visibility in AI-generated answers as something you can test, and reported that some content changes improved visibility in their benchmark, with effects that varied by topic.

Two cautions. It was a controlled benchmark, not a guarantee for your live site. And the commercial AI products change often, so results can shift. Use it as a source of ideas to test, not a recipe.

What Google says about its own AI features

For Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Google's documentation says no special optimization is needed beyond the usual fundamentals. A page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and clicks from these features are counted within normal Search traffic in the Search Console performance report. That makes the checklist below mostly good SEO, with ChatGPT and Perplexity behaviour treated as something to test, not assume.

A practical checklist

1. Be easy to crawl and read

• Do not block AI crawlers by accident in robots.txt unless you mean to.
• Make sure the important content is in the HTML, not hidden behind scripts.
• Keep an up-to-date XML sitemap.

2. Be clear about who you are

• Use one consistent name, description and set of profile links everywhere.
• Add structured data such as Organization or Person, and Article on posts.
• Have a clear About page and an author for every article.

3. Answer real questions directly

• Put the answer in the first paragraph, then explain.
• Use descriptive headings that match how people ask.
• Add a short comparison table or definition where it helps.

4. Give models something worth citing

• Publish original information: your own process, benchmarks you actually ran, or first-hand experience.
• Support claims with named sources and links.
• Be specific. Vague, generic pages get ignored because a hundred others say the same thing.

5. Build mentions beyond your site

Models and search engines both lean on what other sites say about you. Useful steps include genuine reviews, partner pages, community answers and being listed in sensible directories. Avoid spam; it does harm.

6. Keep content fresh and honest

Update pages when facts change. A stale claim is worse than none.

What is unproven

• `llms.txt`. Cheap to add, but there is little evidence it changes citations. I covered it in llms.txt: does it work?.
• Special "AI-optimised" formatting tricks. Treat any claim of a secret format with suspicion.
• Exact ranking factors. They are not public.

How to measure it

1. Test prompts by hand. Every few weeks, ask the questions your customers ask, in ChatGPT and Perplexity, and note whether you are cited. Record the date and the exact wording.
2. Check referral traffic. In your analytics, look for visits from chat and answer-engine domains. The numbers are often small, so look at trends, not single days.
3. Watch brand searches. More people searching your name is a useful signal.
4. Use Search Console for the Google side, since most of the same fundamentals help there too.

A note from my own work

At Presenton AI I worked on the SEO foundation, comparison pages, analytics and a content publishing workflow. I do not have citation data from it that I can honestly publish, so I will not claim any. What I can share is the process: clear structure, real sources, honest comparisons and measurement.

Where to start

If you have an hour: fix crawl access, add structured data and write one genuinely useful page. If you want help with the technical setup or content for a startup, see SEO for SaaS and AI startups.