How to get cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Google AI answers
A growing share of buying research never reaches a results page. Here is what appears to actually influence AI answers, a checklist you can run this week, and an honest account of what nobody can promise you.
You cannot buy a citation in ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews, and anyone selling you guaranteed AI rankings is lying. What you can do is remove every technical reason to be excluded: unambiguous factual content, structured data, AI crawler access, and a machine-readable summary of who you are. Then measure prompt-level visibility monthly so you know where you stand. The work goes by three names — AEO (answer engine optimisation), GEO (generative engine optimisation) and GSO (generative search optimisation). They describe the same discipline, and anyone drawing a hard distinction between them is selling one of the labels.
AEO, GEO, GSO — one thing, three labels
The vocabulary has not settled, which matters mainly because it makes the field look more crowded than it is. Answer engine optimisation came first and is the term most agencies use. Generative engine optimisation arrived with the academic work on the subject and is the term you will see in papers. Generative search optimisation is the newer coinage and is gaining ground fastest in search. All three name the same job: being the source an assistant quotes.
We use AEO throughout this site because it is the oldest and least ambiguous of the three. If you searched for one of the other two, you are in the right place.
Why this matters now
A growing share of commercial research never reaches a page of blue links. Someone asks an assistant "who builds booking systems in Pampanga" and acts on the two or three names it returns. If your business isn't legible to those systems, you're not in the consideration set — and no amount of traditional ranking fixes it, because there was no results page.
This is uncomfortable for the SEO industry because the familiar levers don't map cleanly. Backlinks matter less. Being unambiguously factual and parseable matters far more.
What actually appears to influence AI answers
- Crawler access. If GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are blocked in your
robots.txt, you have opted out. Many sites blocked these in 2024–25 on principle and never revisited it. Check yours today. - Answerable content. Assistants quote passages that answer a question directly. A page that says "we offer competitive pricing" is unquotable. A page that says "a four-page website costs ₱75,000, fixed price, live in two weeks" can be lifted straight into an answer.
- Structured data. Schema.org markup removes ambiguity about what you are, where you operate and what things cost.
ProfessionalServicewith service-area and payment data,FAQPageon question content,Articleon guides, and a real price on every service. - Corroboration. Facts stated consistently in several places — your site, directories, your Google Business Profile — are more likely to be treated as reliable than a claim that appears once.
- An
llms.txt. An emerging convention: a plain-text summary at your root describing who you are, what you charge and what each page covers. Cheap to produce, and it hands an assistant exactly the summary you'd want quoted.
The practical checklist
| Action | Effort | Why it moves the needle |
|---|---|---|
Unblock AI crawlers in robots.txt | 10 minutes | Blocking them is a hard opt-out from every AI answer |
| Publish real prices | Low | "Contact us for pricing" is unquotable; a number is citable |
Add FAQPage schema to question content | Low | Explicitly pairs questions with answers in machine-readable form |
| Write a short answer paragraph at the top of each guide | Low | Gives the assistant a self-contained passage to lift |
Ship an llms.txt | 1 hour | You author the summary instead of leaving it to inference |
| Fix NAP consistency across directories | Medium | Corroboration across sources raises confidence |
| Track prompt-level visibility monthly | Ongoing | The only way to know whether any of it worked |
How to measure something this opaque
You can't see an assistant's ranking factors, but you can build a repeatable test. Write 20–30 prompts a real customer would type — "best web developer near Clark", "how much is a booking system in the Philippines", "agency that builds AI chatbots Pampanga" — and run them monthly across the assistants your market uses. Record whether you were mentioned, in what position, and what was said about you. It's crude, but a trend line over six months is genuinely informative, and it catches the case where you're mentioned inaccurately, which is worse than absence.
What we do on our own site
We practise this rather than just selling it. React Web Development Services ships an llms.txt, explicitly allows the major AI crawlers, carries a full schema graph on every page, publishes every price openly, and opens each guide with a self-contained short answer. None of that guarantees a citation. All of it removes reasons to be skipped.
Traditional SEO asks "how do we rank for this query". AEO asks "if an assistant had to answer this question in three sentences, would it have any reason to mention us — and would what it says be accurate?"
What it costs
Our AEO and AI-search visibility programmes start at ₱42,000/mo, usually alongside a technical SEO audit at ₱55,000 in month one. It compounds slowly and is best judged over two quarters, not two weeks — the same as traditional SEO, for the same reason.
Get this priced for your actual situation
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