How to get your business cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, and why this is the biggest opportunity in digital marketing since Google.
The Shift That’s Already Happening
Something fundamental has changed in how people find information online, and most businesses haven’t noticed yet.
Three years ago, the journey was predictable. Someone needed a plumber, a private jet, an accountant, or a new piece of software. They opened Google, scanned ten blue links, clicked a few, and made a decision. The entire digital marketing industry, SEO agencies, content writers, PPC managers, link builders, was built around that single behaviour.
That behaviour is changing. Today, a growing number of people skip Google entirely. They open ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude and ask a question in plain English. The AI reads thousands of sources in seconds, synthesises the answer, and tells them what to do, often citing two or three sources at most. If your business isn’t one of those sources, you don’t exist in that conversation.
This isn’t a future trend. ChatGPT alone now handles billions of queries each week, and Google’s AI Overviews appear in a significant share of search results. Traffic referred from AI citations also tends to convert at higher rates than organic search, because the person arriving already trusts the recommendation.
The direction is clear. The specifics are still being worked out. That’s exactly what makes this moment worth paying attention to.
Honesty Over Hype
There is no shortage of people selling certainty about AI visibility right now. They’ll tell you they’ve cracked the algorithm. They’ll promise you’ll rank number one in ChatGPT within 30 days. They’ll charge you hundreds of pounds for a playbook built on guesswork dressed up as data.
That’s not what you’ll find here.
Here’s the honest position: nobody outside of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google knows the exact mechanisms these systems use to decide what to cite. Anyone telling you otherwise is either guessing or selling something.
What you’ll get instead is documented experimentation on real sites, the best current research from the most credible voices in digital marketing, and two decades of practical experience understanding how traffic and visibility systems actually work. In a field this new and fast-moving, honest experimentation beats false certainty every time.
The Proof: What the Experiment Actually Showed
Before any of this was written, I ran the experiment in public. Two pages on my own site, tracked across all four major AI platforms, with baselines captured before any changes were made and results published whether they worked or not.
The findings:
A brand-new page, with zero domain authority and zero backlinks, earned citations in Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Gemini within weeks of applying the techniques covered here.
An existing page, retrofitted and corrected, was cited on all four platforms, including three separate citations from Claude on the same query, more than any other platform produced in either experiment.
AEO-style queries and GEO-style queries behaved differently. Every platform cited the factual pricing queries. Only one platform cited a recommendation-style query, and only on the page built specifically for it.
The platform everyone assumed would be slowest produced the strongest single result. Claude cited the retrofitted plumbing page three times; it did not cite the brand-new private jet page at all within the measurement window.
The full methodology, baseline screenshots, and results, including the parts that didn’t work, are documented here: Does GEO and AEO Actually Work? A Documented Test →
That transparency is the point. And it’s the standard everything below is held to.
Your Opportunity Window
Every major shift in digital marketing has had a window, a period where early movers could establish dominance before the approach became saturated.
Sub-dollar Google AdWords clicks in the early 2000s. Facebook followers for a penny in the early 2010s. Niche affiliate sites before Google’s helpful content update. Each of these represented a window that lasted years before closing. The people who moved early built the foundations of significant businesses.
AEO — Answer Engine Optimisation — is in that window right now.
The techniques are not yet widely understood. The competition is scattered. Most SEO agencies are applying old thinking to a new problem, telling clients that if they rank in Google they’ll rank in AI, which the experiment above shows is simply not how this works.
The platforms themselves are still in land-grab mode, meaning they have every incentive to surface the best content rather than favour incumbents.
Brian Dean’s own Backlinko site has seen LLM traffic grow 800% year on year. Semrush forecasts that LLM traffic will overtake Google search by 2027.
We are, as one researcher put it, in the AltaVista and Lycos phase of AI search, before a clear winner has emerged, before the walls go up, before the enshittification that inevitably follows maturity. (If you haven’t come across the term before, it means the slow degradation of a platform once it no longer has to compete for users.)
This is your chance to be early.
What You Get
Everything is built in a deliberate sequence. Each chapter depends on the one before it, skip ahead and you’ll miss the foundation that makes the tactics work.
Inside:
The full framework, from entity clarity and structured content through to multi-source presence and honest measurement. The principles that stay stable even as the platforms change.
The tactics, tested on real sites. Chapter 10 walks through the experiment in full, what was done, in what order, and what actually happened. You should be able to replicate the process on your own site and measure your own results.
A measurement method you can trust. How to document a baseline, separate your queries by type, and track citation frequency over time, so you can tell whether any of this is working, rather than guessing.
No false certainty. Nobody can guarantee you’ll be cited in any specific AI system within any specific timeframe. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something they don’t have. What you get is the best possible foundation based on current evidence, and an honest framework for measuring it.
A Note on Timing
This field moves fast. What’s covered here reflects the best available knowledge as of mid-2026. Some specifics will change, platform behaviours evolve, new tools emerge, and the AI companies themselves are constantly updating their systems. The principles, however, entity clarity, structured content, multi-source presence, honest measurement, are durable.
The tactics are already working. They’re working on a brand-new page with no authority, and on an old page with a decade of accumulated mistakes. The question isn’t whether this works. It’s how long the window stays open.
Let’s get started.
The experiment is run by Martin Loader, Guernsey Donkey SEO, based in Guernsey, Channel Islands. The full guide is available right here – Get Found in AI: The Definitive Guide to LLM Visibility.