Thanks to everyone who joined this week’s workshop on getting your business recommended by ChatGPT and other AI search tools. Here’s the full recap for anyone who couldn’t make it, plus a few things we didn’t have time to get to live.
View the Workshop Slides
Why This Topic, and Why Now
Clients have been asking the same question for months: “We’ve done SEO and Google Ads for 20 years. How do we get recommended by ChatGPT?” I use AI more than Google search these days, and I’d bet most of you do too. Nobody’s clicking to page three of Google results anymore. The game is shifting, and the businesses that adapt early are the ones showing up in AI answers six months from now.
How ChatGPT Decides What to Recommend
It comes down to a few things: training data, real-time web browsing, and trusted sources. If you’re a brand-new startup or a smaller company, you might not be in the training data yet. That’s fine. What you can control is whether trusted sources are talking about you, and whether your own site is structured in a way AI tools can actually parse.
Start With an Audit
Before you change anything, look yourself up. Search for your business and your core services across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google’s AI Overview, and Copilot. See who’s showing up. See who’s being cited as the source.
I ran a search for “best AEO agencies in Los Angeles” the other day. Emarketed didn’t show up in that specific one — we’re working on it — but the companies that did had something in common: they were being cited by LinkedIn posts, industry roundups, and listicle-style blog articles like “15 AEO SEO Tips for LA Businesses.”
That’s a tactic worth stealing. Listicles get cited. Just make sure yours is actually useful and substantive, not a thin piece of content that lists your own company and two others. AI tools are getting better at spotting those.
Getting Cited in the Right Places
Wikipedia is one of the heaviest hitters for citations, and it’s also one of the hardest to get on. If your product or service is genuinely relevant to an existing Wikipedia page, reach out to the editor managing that section. Don’t try to game it.
Beyond Wikipedia, industry roundups, LinkedIn articles, and tool directories are where citations come from. One thing that’s worked well for us: building free tools. We have around 10 on emarketed.com/tools, and one of them — our Topic Authority tool — got picked up in a ChatGPT response alongside YouTube, Clearscope, and MarketMuse. That’s a big deal for a small agency to sit next to those names. Someone found our tool, wrote a blog about it, and now it’s a citation source.
I’m going to start recommending this to clients across industries. A roofing materials company in LA? Build a free roof estimator or materials calculator. Put it online, make it genuinely useful, and let it pull in citations over time.
Tools We’re Using
SEMrush has jumped on the AI bandwagon with new ways to track brand visibility in AI search. It’s a couple hundred bucks a month, so not for everyone, but useful if you’re already paying for it.
AKII is newer, around $99/month. You can track which prompts your brand shows up in across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google AI, and save the ones that matter. It also has a feature where it queries AI providers about your brand on a schedule — a few questions a day, or up to 20–30 if you want to be aggressive. The idea is you’re nudging the AI tools to go look up your business and refresh what they know. It’s too early to say definitively that it moves the needle, but we’re running it for ourselves and some clients.
Google Search Console is free and essential. It shows you how Google sees your site and which terms people are finding you for. We got serious about SEO and AEO for ourselves again last October, and Search Console has been how we track whether the changes are working. Traffic and rankings are both up.
What AI-Ready Content Actually Looks Like
People search differently in AI tools. Google searches tend to be keyword fragments. AI searches are conversational questions: “Who are the best digital marketing companies in Los Angeles?” Your content should match that.
A few things that matter:
Lead with the answer. If someone asks a question, answer it in the first paragraph. Then use the rest of the page to reinforce and expand. Don’t bury the answer under 800 words of setup.
Use questions as headings. Not every heading needs to be a question, but some should be. It signals to AI tools exactly what the page answers.
FAQs everywhere. We have FAQ sections on our homepage, about page, and every blog post. They help AI search, and they help real readers who want to skim.
Schema markup. This is the code-level stuff most people don’t see. Article schema, review schema, FAQ schema, organization schema. Pick what matches your page type and make sure it’s in place.
E-E-A-T signals. Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust. Link authors to their credentials. On our blogs, I link to my LinkedIn so both Google and ChatGPT can see I’ve been doing this for 25+ years. If you’re publishing in a regulated space like healthcare, link content to a credentialed expert. It matters more than ever.
Technical Cleanup
A few quick technical hits: write descriptive titles and meta descriptions — don’t try to be clever, and don’t stuff keywords, just describe what’s on the page. Keep your name, address, and phone consistent across your site and directories. Avoid JavaScript-only content that crawlers can’t read. Use clean URL structures like /services/seo instead of /page?id=42.
The Biggest Mistakes
The pattern I see over and over:
- Not considering AI search at all, still writing for old-school keyword rankings
- Missing or inconsistent business info across the web
- No schema markup anywhere
- Content that buries the answer ten paragraphs in
- No clear “who we are, what we do” statement on the homepage
Quick Wins You Can Do This Week
Update your homepage intro so it directly states what you do and who you serve. Add an FAQ section to your highest-traffic pages. Make sure your Google Business Profile is complete and current. Add basic schema markup. And run your site through one of the free AI visibility tools on emarketed.com to see where you stand.
Q&A Highlights
Archie asked about applying these tactics in the video game space, which is a whole different animal. Discovery there happens inside platforms like Steam, in Discord communities, on Reddit, and through creator recommendations. A lot of the core ideas still apply — get cited by trusted sources, build something genuinely useful, make your content easy to find and understand — but the channels are completely different. When you’re competing against billion-dollar studios, the independent path is usually niche community building and tools that give players real value, like strategy helpers or stat trackers.
Wrapping Up
AI search isn’t replacing SEO. It’s layering on top of it. The fundamentals still matter, but the way you structure content, the questions you answer, and the citations you earn matter more than they used to.
If you want to check how your site is doing, the free tools at emarketed.com/tools are a good starting point. And if you want to join the next workshop on AI search visibility, grab a spot for April 29.
This post is a recap of the “How to Optimize for ChatGPT” workshop presented by Matt Ramage, founder of Emarketed, a digital marketing agency helping businesses get found on Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI search since 1998.
