How to Make Your Business Appear in AI Search Engines
Check what AI says about you, let the AI search crawlers in, get indexed in Google and Bing, say plainly on your site what you sell, then get reviewed, compared and listed on other sites.
Not needed: special schema, AI text files or a separate "AI optimization" for Google. Google's own docs say so.
Free check: Bing Webmaster Tools shows which of your pages Copilot cites, and for which searches.
When ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini named a business in MentionAgent's buyer-question panel, that business's own site was among the cited sources in 74% of answers. When they did not name it, 2%.
Copilot, on our own site: review, "X vs Y" and best-of list pages took 85% of its citations over 3 months. How-to guides took 2%.
The six steps
| Step | Engines it affects | Where to do it |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Check what AI says about you | All | Bing AI Performance, Search Console, a list of buyer questions |
| 2. Allow the search crawlers | ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity | robots.txt and your CDN or firewall |
| 3. Get indexed in Google | AI Overviews, AI Mode | Search Console, Business Profile, Merchant Center |
| 4. Get indexed in Bing | Microsoft Copilot | Bing Webmaster Tools, IndexNow |
| 5. Say what you are, in plain words | All | Your homepage and service pages |
| 6. Get reviewed, compared and listed | All | Other people's sites |
Check what AI says about you now
- ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity: none of them has a site-owner report. Write down the questions a buyer would ask ("best [your category] in [your city]"), ask each engine, and note who gets named and which pages are cited. These prompts are a starting set.
- Copilot: Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance. It shows citations per page and the grounding queries behind them. The Topics Portfolio view, added 13 October 2026, groups them into topics and lists opportunity queries for each one.
- Google: sites appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode are reported in the Search Console Performance report, "within the 'Web' search type". They are not broken out separately.
Repeat it monthly with the same questions, because answers move. In our citation study, asking again a fortnight later changed about half the sources.
Let the search crawlers in
ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity each run a search crawler separate from their training crawler, and blocking the search one keeps you out of that engine's search answers. OpenAI's crawler page: "Sites that are opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though can still appear as navigational links."
- ChatGPT: allow
OAI-SearchBot. BlockingGPTBot(training) is a separate setting. - Claude: allow
Claude-SearchBotandClaude-User. Anthropic says disabling either may reduce your visibility in its search results. - Perplexity: allow
PerplexityBot, which Perplexity says is "not used to crawl content for AI foundation models."
Check the firewall too. A Cloudflare or WAF bot rule can block these crawlers even when robots.txt allows them, which is why Perplexity's docs include firewall allow-rule steps.
Get indexed in Google and Bing
Google's rule for AI Overviews and AI Mode is the ordinary one: "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet." Verify the site in Search Console and fix anything marked "Crawled - currently not indexed" on the pages that describe what you sell. For a local business or a shop, the same Google page lists "Checking that your Merchant Center and Business Profile information is up-to-date".
Copilot is Microsoft's, and Bing Webmaster Tools is where Microsoft reports its citations, so verify the site there, submit the sitemap and turn on IndexNow, which tells Bing when a page is added or changed.
Describe yourself on your own site
In MentionAgent's panel, a named business was usually named alongside its own page: 74% of the time the engine had cited the business's site in the same answer. So make that page easy to quote:
- Say the category in the words a buyer uses ("bookkeeping for dental practices", not "financial clarity for growing teams").
- Put who it is for, where you operate and what it costs on a crawlable page, not inside an image or a PDF.
- Give each service its own page, so a narrow question has a page that answers exactly that.
Get reviewed, compared and listed
On our site, the grounding queries Copilot ran before citing a page read like a buyer's shortlist: "klientboost seo services review", "siege media enterprise seo agency review", "creatoriq vs aspire influencer marketing platform comparison".
Which of our pages Copilot cited, 19 July to 18 October 2026:
| Page type | Share of Copilot citations |
|---|---|
| Reviews of a named company | 44% |
| Best-of lists and directories | 21% |
| "X vs Y" comparisons | 20% |
| How-to guides | 2% |
| "X alternatives" pages | 1.3% |
| Homepage | 0% |
The pages Copilot cited were mostly reviews, lists and comparisons about other businesses. If those pages exist about you, they can be cited when someone asks about your category. The ways to get onto them:
- Best-of lists in your category. Search "best [your category]" and ask the authors to consider you. Listicle outreach covers the pitch.
- Reviews. Ask customers for reviews on the directories your category uses, and pitch niche bloggers to review the product.
- Comparisons. Publish an honest "you vs the leader" page on your own site. Comparisons were a fifth of Copilot's citations of our pages.
- Mentions in articles. Pitch niche publications and find existing mentions that can carry a link.
UnikBrushes makes the same point in its guide to getting a brand recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity: when others reference your work, "AI sees independent validation instead of self-promotion."
Get onto the pages AI engines read
MentionAgent finds blog posts in your niche, finds the author's email and writes each pitch against the post. You approve emails before they send, or turn on auto-send. $99/mo.
Start Getting Mentioned On AutopilotWhat you don't need
Google's AI features page: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features. There's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add." Schema still helps ordinary rich results. It is not a ticket into the AI answer. Our llms.txt checker found a valid llms.txt on 196 of the 500 domains AI assistants cite most, so most cited sites get cited without one.
Method and limits
Own-site data. The panel is a generated set of buyer questions ("best [category] tools", "[competitor] alternatives", audience and pain-point questions) that MentionAgent asks ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini with web search on, for the sites of its customers, 8 July to 19 October 2026. Counted: answers with at least one cited source. Excluded: questions that already contained the brand's name, and mentionagent.ai itself. A business counted as named when its name or domain appeared in the answer text after links were removed.
| Engine | Own site cited, business named | Own site cited, not named |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT | 83% | 0% |
| Claude | 71% | 3% |
| Gemini | 69% | 3% |
| All three | 74% | 2% |
This is an association, not proof of cause: it shows the business and its own page usually arrive together. Copilot data is Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report for mentionagent.ai, which covers Microsoft Copilot, AI summaries in Bing and select partner integrations, 19 July to 18 October 2026, grouped by URL pattern. It covers one site in one market.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get my business to show up in AI search?
Check what AI says about you now, let each engine's search crawler in, get indexed in Google and Bing, say plainly on your own site what you sell and for whom, and get reviewed, compared and listed on other sites.
How do I get AI to suggest my business?
Be on the pages it reads when someone asks about your category: best-of lists, reviews and comparisons, plus a page on your own site that says what you do. In MentionAgent's buyer-question panel, a business that got named had its own site cited in 74% of those answers.
Do I need schema or an llms.txt file to appear in AI search?
Not for Google. Its AI features page says you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup, and that there's no special schema.org structured data to add. The page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.
How do I check if AI search engines cite my site?
Bing Webmaster Tools has an AI Performance report that shows citations of your pages in Microsoft Copilot and partners, the grounding queries behind them, and since October 2026 a Topics Portfolio. Google counts AI Overviews and AI Mode inside the Web search type in Search Console. For ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, re-run a fixed set of buyer questions and record who gets named.
Should I block AI crawlers?
Not the search ones if you want to appear. OpenAI says sites opted out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers (they can still appear as navigational links), and Perplexity recommends allowing PerplexityBot to appear in its results. Training crawlers such as GPTBot are separate settings and can be blocked independently.