How to get your business cited by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews

A growing share of queries now gets a written answer before the list of links: AI Overviews on Google, sourced answers in ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot. Those answers cite only a handful of pages. Being one of them is gradually replacing the classic first position.

• These systems do not read a site the way a visitor does.
• They extract short, self-contained passages that answer a precise question.
• A page that buries its answer under a long preamble is rarely picked up, even when it ranks well.

They rely on rendered HTML, structured data and mentions of your brand elsewhere on the web. A site whose content only appears after heavy scripts run, or whose key facts live inside images, stays partly invisible to them.

Company name, address, services and prices must be present as text, consistent across pages and identical to your Google profile and directory listings. Inconsistencies lower the trust placed in the source.

Every section should stand on its own: a question as heading, a direct answer in the first two sentences, then the nuance. That is exactly the shape a generative engine isolates and quotes.

Dated figures, clear definitions and explicit comparisons get picked up more often than generalities. State the date, the source and the Belgian scope where it applies: an engine prefers verifiable information to a vague claim.

Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and Article markup in JSON-LD helps these systems tie your content to a recognised entity. It guarantees nothing, but it removes the common ambiguity between businesses with similar names.

Check that robots.txt does not block the AI crawlers you want to allow, and that important pages load quickly without errors. A slow or blocked page is simply not read.

Analytics tools still do not separate traffic from generative answers cleanly. Track visits by referring site, mentions of your brand, and enquiries that name an AI answer as their entry point.

• Do not rewrite the whole site for AI.
• Improve first the pages that answer a real customer question, then watch over a few months which ones get cited.
• Editorial quality remains the main lever.