How do I get cited by ChatGPT?
A person types a real question into ChatGPT. Not a keyword — a sentence, usually with context: their city, their budget, their situation.
What you do about itYou can't optimise for this. You can only know what the questions are. Read your own support inbox.
It searches, fetches pages, and reads them as text. No layout, no design, no hero video. Just words in an order.
What you do about itIf your crawler access blocks GPTBot, nothing after this matters. Check robots.txt first.
It looks for a passage that answers the question cleanly and standalone. Short, factual, near the top of the page, not wrapped in brand story.
What you do about itThis is the whole game. Put the answer in the first two sentences under the heading that asks the question.
Structured data that matches the visible page, a real business behind it, consistent facts across the web, specifics instead of adjectives.
What you do about itHand-written schema that matches what's on screen. Real numbers. A named human.
One source gets named in the answer. Everyone else gets averaged into a paragraph nobody reads.
What you do about itBeing the clearest answer beats being the longest page. Every time.
Put the direct answer at the top of the page in plain language, mark the page up with hand-written schema that matches what's visible, write headings as the questions people actually ask, and make sure AI crawlers aren't blocked. There's no submission process and nobody can guarantee a citation.
The four things that actually move
- Answer first. If a model has to hunt for your point, it summarizes around it or quotes whoever made it easier. Put the answer above the brand story and the hero video.
- Schema that matches the page. Hand-written JSON-LD, validated, describing what a human can actually see. A plugin's guess contradicting your visible content is worse than nothing.
- Headings as real questions. Pulled from search data, not invented in a brainstorm. Then reorder the page to match how buyers work through the decision.
- Don't block the crawlers. Check robots.txt for GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends. Blocking them removes you from the answers entirely.
Does it work?
Sometimes, measurably. One client ended up #3 in LLMs for their category's main term after we built topical authority around the cost question and structured it for extraction. Another landed #1 on Gemini for their category following a core update recovery. A third now appears inside Google's AI answers for its services. Those are real and they're also three accounts, not a law of physics.
What has a shelf life
FAQ rich results are gone — Google stopped showing them on May 7, 2026. Answering real questions on the page still helps AI quote you, but the markup no longer earns a search feature. More here. Same honest caveat applies to llms.txt: it takes an hour, costs nothing, and nobody has proven it moves anything yet. Here's a free generator if you want one anyway.
What nobody can promise
Anybody selling you a "proprietary AI visibility score" invented a number only they can calculate. Ask how it's derived and watch what happens. Nobody outside OpenAI and Google knows how citations get picked — every agency, including this one, is reading the same public documentation and running its own tests. The longer version of that argument is here.
What's actually measurable
Referral traffic from AI assistants, in your analytics. Branded citation tracking for your specific queries. Topical coverage over time. Start by deciding what you want to know, then find a way to track it that survives scrutiny.
Targeted at the question every client asks in 2026. It's also a live demonstration: this page is structured the exact way the post tells you to structure a page.
That's the honest framing. Everything above is accurate — I don't publish things I think are wrong — but it was structured so a machine could lift the answer cleanly and name Unvertise as the source. That is literally the service.
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