Matt Turley, Continuum. Updated September 28, 2026.
Be listed on the sites ChatGPT already reads for your kind of work, and have one page that answers the buyer's exact question in its first hundred words. A Google ranking alone will not get you named. When I checked my own site, a plain web search had it in the top 10 for 5 of 15 questions, and ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini named me on none of them.
Being found and being named are two separate steps. In an August 2026 study of 45 queries where a site ranked at position 12 or better on Google, a live web-search index surfaced the site on 27 of them, 60 percent. A browsing AI model cited it on only 7, 15.6 percent. Ranking bought retrieval. It did not buy the citation.
A citation is still not a mention. The AI can pull your page in as a source and never say your name. My own site was cited as a link in 5 of 18 questions in the week I tracked, which is a smaller win than being named.
Mostly other people's sites. On September 28, 2026 I asked ChatGPT and Gemini who the best real estate agent is in Phoenix and in Dallas, 12 answers per tool. ChatGPT cited therealtorrankings.com in 11 of 12 answers. Gemini cited fastexpert.com in 11 of 12. Both leaned hardest on rankings, agent-matching and local magazine sites, and the two tools mostly read different sites. It is a small sample, two cities on one day and 24 answers in total.
Bookkeepers look the same. In September 2026 I checked bookkeepers in Denver with 10 buyer questions, each asked three times on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. The sources cited most were directories and review sites. Clutch.co was cited in 66 of 90 answers and expertise.com in 60 of 90. Sound Advice Bookkeeping, the bookkeeper named most, came up on 19 of 30 checks and on all three tools.
Which sites matter depends on the field. On 12 Charleston trip questions the engines cited 302 links, and TripAdvisor was 47 of them while Reddit was 4. For software questions it flips, and Reddit, GitHub and dev.to lead.
So start by asking the engines your buyers' questions and writing down the sites they cite. Then get listed and reviewed on those sites. That is usually the bigger lever, and your own page is the second one.
In that August study the pages that won the citation had a few habits in common. I write my own answer pages this way now.
Check this before you write anything. Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt, and says a web application firewall may need to whitelist its bots. Changes to robots.txt can take up to 24 hours to show up on their side.
Do the same review for every AI crawler you care about. A good page the crawler cannot read will never be quoted.
Write down the questions a real buyer would ask. Ask each one three times, because answers change from run to run, and only count a question as won when you show up in most of the runs.
Keep named and cited apart, and keep each engine apart too. The week I tracked, ChatGPT named me in 8 of 42 questions over 183 answers while Perplexity named me in 0 of 41 over 200. One engine can move while another sits still.
If you would rather not run the questions yourself, my AI Answer Check does it across ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and shows who they name instead of you, plus the fixes worth the most. It is $299, and it does not promise what AI tools will say.
Get Users is the monthly version. It is $1,200 a month, month to month, with a weekly scoreboard of what the three tools say about you, and there are no ads and no free trial.