How do you get mentioned in ChatGPT and rank in AI Overviews?
Nobody can switch on an AI mention, but you can make one much more likely: be written about by sources AI tools trust, keep the facts about your business clear and consistent everywhere they appear, and make sure your website can be found and read. That is the honest answer to how to rank in AI Overviews and how to get mentioned in ChatGPT, and it is far less mysterious than much of the advice online suggests.
This guide explains how AI assistants choose what to say, what generative engine optimisation (GEO) really means, the steps you can take yourself this month, and how to check what the tools say about you today.
What is GEO (generative engine optimisation)?
GEO, short for generative engine optimisation, is the practice of improving how often and how accurately AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews mention your business. You will also see it called AI search optimisation, answer engine optimisation (AEO) or LLM SEO. They all describe the same goal.
It is not a separate discipline with secret rules. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special AI markup or files. A page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet, and the usual good practice applies. OpenAI’s advice for ChatGPT search is similarly practical: allow its OAI-SearchBot crawler in your site’s robots.txt file.
In other words, GEO is sound SEO plus reputation. The technical part is small. The reputation part, being talked about in the right places, is where the real work lies.
How do AI assistants choose which brands to mention?
AI assistants answer in two broad ways. Sometimes they rely on what the underlying model learned during training, which reflects whatever was widely written about you up to a point in time. Increasingly, they also search the web live and summarise what they find, citing sources as they go.
Either way, they tend to name businesses that appear repeatedly and consistently across sources they consider credible. The research on which sources those are is striking:
- Muck Rack analysed more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini and found that earned media accounted for 84% of citations, with journalism alone at 27% and paid or advertorial content at 0.3%. ChatGPT cited sources in 96% of its responses.
- Pew Research Center found that Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit were the most commonly linked sources in Google’s AI summaries, just as they are in standard results.
- Google’s AI Overviews can only link to pages that are indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet, so the basics of search visibility carry straight over.
Think about what that means for a prompt like “best country-house hotels near Cirencester”. The answer is assembled from sources such as national travel lists, established hotel guides, review sites and the regional press. The hotels that appear in several of those places are the ones most likely to be named.
Why earned media matters more than links
For years, SEO revolved around links. For AI visibility, mentions appear to matter more. Ahrefs studied 75,000 brands and found that branded web mentions correlated with AI visibility at 0.656 to 0.709 across AI Overviews, AI Mode and ChatGPT, against 0.266 to 0.326 for Domain Rating, its measure of link authority. Mentions on YouTube showed the strongest relationship of all.
Two cautions. Correlation is not cause: brands that are mentioned a lot also tend to be larger and better known. And a mention only helps if it appears somewhere credible and relevant. But the practical lesson holds. An unlinked line about your restaurant in a national round-up, or your head chef quoted in a food feature, now does useful work even without a link.
This is also why you cannot buy your way in. Advertorial barely registers, at 0.3% of citations in the Muck Rack data. Genuine coverage is the route, and earning it is what digital PR is for.
What you can do yourself
Much of the groundwork needs no agency at all.
- State your facts clearly on your own website. What you are, where you are, who you are for, what you cost, what makes you different, and any awards you have genuinely won. Put it in plain text, not only in images or PDFs: Google recommends making important content available in textual form. A clear About page and an honest FAQ page do a lot of work.
- Check you are not blocking the tools. Look at your robots.txt file, or ask your web developer to, and make sure you are not blocking Googlebot or OAI-SearchBot, and that important pages are not set to “noindex” or “nosnippet”.
- Keep your listings consistent. Your name, address, description and opening hours should match across your Google Business Profile, TripAdvisor, booking platforms, social profiles and directories. Google specifically recommends keeping Business Profile information up to date. Inconsistent details give AI tools conflicting facts to choose between.
- Earn and answer reviews. Reviews are one of the few places customers describe you in their own words. Ask happy guests or clients to leave one, and reply to all of them, including the difficult ones.
- Publish expert content only you could write. An estate manager on hedgerow restoration, a sommelier on English sparkling wine, an interior designer on working with listed buildings. Specific, first-hand knowledge is what journalists quote and AI tools pick up.
- Get into trusted lists. Awards shortlists, established guides, tourism bodies, professional directories and editorial round-ups. Check whether a list is editorial or paid: pay-to-play directories carry little weight with readers or editors, and, on the evidence above, very little with AI.
- Consider video. Given the strength of YouTube mentions in the Ahrefs data, a few well-made films of your hotel, kitchen or workshop, properly titled and described, are worth considering if they suit your brand.
- Earn press coverage. The single biggest lever, and the hardest to pull alone. Our guide on how to get press coverage walks through the basics.
How to check what AI says about you
Treat this like a mystery shop, repeated every month or quarter.
- Write 10 to 20 prompts your customers would ask. For example: “best spa hotel in the Cotswolds for a birthday weekend”, “farm shop near Tetbury with a café”, “interior designers in the Cotswolds who work on listed buildings”, “wedding venues near Cheltenham for 120 guests”.
- Run them in the main tools. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot and Google Search, noting whether an AI Overview appears. Use a fresh chat, and a logged-out browser if you can.
- Record the results. Whether you are named, where in the answer, how you are described, which competitors appear and which sources are cited.
- Run each prompt more than once. AI answers vary between runs, so a single result proves little. Look for patterns over time.
- Fix what is wrong at the source. If an assistant gets your prices, location or offer wrong, find where that information comes from, whether an old listing, an outdated article or your own site, and correct it there.
A simple log is enough to start. An illustrative row:
| Prompt | Tool | Named? | How described | Sources cited | Competitors named |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best spa hotel in the Cotswolds for a birthday | ChatGPT | No | Not mentioned | A travel magazine list, a review site | Three nearby hotels |
Paid tools such as Ahrefs Brand Radar can track this at scale later, but a spreadsheet will show you where you stand.
Keep AI in proportion
It is easy to overestimate how many of your customers use AI assistants today. The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found that 4% of people in the UK use AI chatbots for news each week, the lowest of any market surveyed, against 10% globally. Trust in AI chatbot answers was just 6% in the UK, also the lowest of any market. Those figures are about news, not shopping or travel planning, but they are a useful check on the hype.
Google’s AI summaries reach far more people. In Pew’s study of US users in March 2025, they appeared on around one in five Google searches. For most Cotswold businesses, then, AI Overviews on Google matter more today than ChatGPT, and both are best treated as one more place where a strong reputation shows up.
The good news is that you do not have to choose. Clear facts, good reviews and credible coverage help with Google, with AI and with the customer reading about you in a magazine. That is why the work is worth doing however fast AI grows.
What nobody can promise
No one controls what an AI assistant says. Answers change as models are updated, vary from one run to the next, and differ by user and location. Be wary of anyone who guarantees you a position in ChatGPT or promises to get you into AI Overviews by a set date. What an agency can honestly do is increase the number and quality of credible mentions, fix the facts, and measure whether it is working.
If you would like help with that, our AI search visibility service starts with an audit of what the main assistants say about you now. Or get in touch and we can talk through what we find for a few of your customers’ prompts.