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AI SEO: how to get your business into AI answers

AI SEO is the work of getting your business into the answer when someone asks an AI assistant a question instead of typing it into a search box. There are two outcomes. A mention is when the answer names you. A citation is when the answer links to a page on your site as a source. You can get one without the other.

Below: how answer engines choose sources, our own result, and what to do first.

What AI SEO is, and what it isn't

Classic SEO aims at a ranked list of links. AI SEO aims at a written answer that names a few businesses and cites a few pages. You are in the answer or you are not, and it can change each time someone asks.

It isn't a separate discipline with secret rules. Google's guidance says that from its point of view, optimizing for generative AI search "is optimizing for the search experience, and thus still SEO." That matches our own data: the pages cited in our report were ordinary articles, review pages and comparison posts, not special AI files.

How answer engines pick sources

Engines that search the web work in a similar way. The model turns the question into one or more searches, reads what comes back, writes an answer, and attaches citations to the pages it used. OpenAI's documentation for its web search tool says responses include inline citations for URLs found in the search results, plus a separate list of every source the model consulted, and that the number of sources "is often greater than the number of citations." Google describes a "query fan-out" technique for AI Overviews and AI Mode, where the system runs several related searches across subtopics before it writes a response.

You have to be findable by the search step. If a crawler can't reach your page, or your key facts only appear after scripts run, the model never reads them.

And the model works with whatever the search step returns. For "best X" or "X vs Y" questions, that is mostly other people's pages: review sites, comparison articles and listicles. Your homepage is one source among many.

Worked example: our own site scored 0/100

Before we renamed the product to Answer Checkup, it was called ShowsUpIn and lived at showsupin.com. On October 15, 2026, the day after we registered that domain, we ran our full report on it. We asked 25 buyer questions 3 times on each of two engines, the OpenAI API with web search and the Perplexity API. That is 150 answers.

  • Visibility score: 0 out of 100.
  • Answers that mentioned us: 0 of 150.
  • Answers that cited a page on our domain: 0 of 150.
  • Answers that named at least one of the three competitors we tracked (Profound, Otterly.AI and Peec AI): 49 of 150. Profound and Otterly.AI were each named in 31 answers and Peec AI in 26.

The citations were the useful part. The 150 answers made 510 citations to 294 different pages on 199 domains. The most cited were g2.com (26, though 17 of those came from questions using our old name, mostly ShowUpInAI's G2 pages), writesonic.com (20), scrunch.com (18), superframeworks.com and thebrandhopper.com (16 each) and frase.io (14). Only 19 of 510 citations went to the competitors' own sites (otterly.ai 9, peec.ai 7, tryprofound.com 3). Most of the coverage came from other sites.

A new domain scoring zero is no surprise. The report shows where the work is, and little of it is on your own homepage.

Steps a small business can take

1. Let the search crawlers in

Check robots.txt and any firewall or CDN bot rules. OpenAI says sites that opt out of OAI-SearchBot "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers," and that GPTBot, its training crawler, is a separate setting. Perplexity says PerplexityBot is the crawler that surfaces sites in its search results and that it is not used to train foundation models. So you can allow the search bots and still block training if you prefer. OpenAI says a robots.txt change takes about 24 hours to take effect, and Perplexity says up to 24 hours.

2. Put your facts in plain HTML

Open your page source and search for your name, what you sell and your prices. If they are missing from the raw HTML, a crawler that doesn't run scripts won't see them.

3. Add structured data that matches the page

Use JSON-LD with schema.org types. Organization goes on the homepage, with sameAs links to your real profiles. Product with Offer goes where you list prices. Article goes on posts, and FAQPage on pages that answer questions. Google's rule is that structured data must describe content visible on the page. Google also says its AI features need no special schema, and it stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026. Treat FAQPage as tidy, machine-readable Q&A, not a ranking trick.

4. Publish an llms.txt file

llms.txt is a short markdown file at /llms.txt that summarizes your site and links to the pages an agent should read first. It takes a few minutes to write. Be realistic about it: it helps agents and tools that look for it, and Google says it isn't needed for Google Search and won't help or hurt rankings there.

5. Write the FAQ content buyers ask for

Collect the questions from your sales calls and inbox. Answer each one on a page in plain sentences, with real prices and dates. Our own question set was built from shapes like "How much does X cost?", "Is X trustworthy?" and "Best X for beginners."

6. Get cited on third-party pages

This is the slow part, and it's where our report's citations came from. Claim and complete your listings on the review sites for your category. Ask real customers for honest reviews. Send the people who write comparison posts in your niche accurate information they can check. Don't buy reviews or plant fake mentions. Google's guidance says seeking inauthentic mentions "isn't as helpful as it might seem."

7. Use one name everywhere

Our report taught us this one. In 28 of the 66 answers to questions that used our old name, the engine brought up a different product, ShowUpInAI. In 16 it answered as if we were that product, and in the other 12 it asked whether we meant it. The names were too close. That is a large part of why we renamed to Answer Checkup. Pick one spelling of your business name and use it on your site, your listings, your profiles and your structured data.

Measure, then measure again

Answers vary between runs, so ask 10 to 25 buyer questions a few times each, record who is named and which URLs are cited, and repeat monthly. Our post on how to check if ChatGPT recommends your business walks through the manual method, and our guide to GEO covers the research behind these steps.

FAQ

Is AI SEO different from regular SEO?
Mostly not. The foundations are the same: crawlable pages, clear facts, useful content and real coverage on other sites. What changes is what you measure. You track mentions and citations inside answers, not a position in a list.
Can anyone guarantee my business will show up in AI answers?
No. The engines decide, and answers change between runs. Be wary of anyone who promises placement.
Do I need llms.txt for AI SEO?
It's optional. It's cheap and useful for agents, but Google says it isn't needed for Google Search. Fix crawler access, raw HTML and structured data first.
How long does AI SEO take to work?
There is no fixed timeline. OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to register and Perplexity says up to 24 hours, but mentions on other sites take much longer to earn.
Why did your own site score 0?
It was a day-old domain with no coverage elsewhere, and its name was close to an existing product.

Check your own site

Run the free scan on the Answer Checkup homepage. It checks whether AI crawlers can read your site and whether your key facts, llms.txt and structured data are in place.

Answer Checkup is not affiliated with OpenAI, Perplexity or Google.
Contact: hello@answercheckup.com

Sources

All pages fetched and checked on October 15, 2026.