How do I get my business quoted by ChatGPT and Google's AI answers?
A practical checklist for making your site citable by AI answer engines — content structure, structured data, crawler access, and how to measure whether it worked.
You get quoted by an AI answer engine by publishing passages it can lift out of your page intact and attribute. There is no submission process, no paid placement and no guaranteed route — the models assemble answers from sources they can reach and parse, so the work is making your content the easiest correct answer available. In practice that means four things: let the crawlers in, define your subject explicitly in the opening lines of every page, answer real questions under headings that ask them, and attach concrete figures to every claim. Sites that do this get cited more often than sites that do not. Nobody can promise more precision than that, and you should be wary of anyone who does.
1. Check the crawlers can actually reach you
AI engines use their own user agents, and some sites block them by accident through
an over-broad robots.txt rule or a bot-protection service. Decide deliberately
whether you want to be included, then confirm your rules match that decision. If you
want citations, you have to permit the crawl.
Also make sure the content exists in the HTML. A page that renders its text only after JavaScript executes is a gamble — some crawlers run scripts, some do not.
2. Open every page with a definition
The first paragraph should name its subject and define it, in a way that would make sense pasted into a document with no other context. If your opening line is “We’ve been helping businesses since 2011”, there is nothing there to quote. If it is “Generative engine optimisation is the practice of structuring content so AI answer engines can extract and attribute it”, there is.
3. Turn headings into questions people ask
Then answer each one immediately beneath, in the first sentence, before any elaboration. Most business sites have headings like “Our Process” and “Why Choose Us”. Those match no question anyone types.
The test is simple: would somebody say this sentence out loud to an assistant? “How much does a small business website cost in the UK?” passes. “Ready to get started?” does not — that is a call to action wearing a question mark.
4. Attach a number to every claim
Specifics are what make a passage worth quoting. Prices, timescales, named standards, dates, measured scores. “We build fast, accessible websites” is unquotable. “WCAG 2.2 AA, delivered in 10 to 15 working days, from £2,400” is a sentence an answer engine can use and a reader can act on.
5. Add structured data
Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article, and Offer where you publish
prices. This lets a machine read what you do and what it costs without inferring it
from prose. It is cheap, it is well documented, and most small business sites still
do not have it.
How to measure it
Write down the ten questions a customer would actually ask about your category. Ask them across several engines. Record whether you are cited, and date the record. Repeat monthly.
This is coarser than rank tracking and it should be presented that way — outputs vary between runs and between users. What you are watching is a trend, not a position.
What not to expect
No guarantees. No control over how you are described. No mechanism to correct an answer that misrepresents you, beyond publishing better source material. That is the honest state of the field, and it is worth knowing before you buy anything labelled “AI visibility”.