Your buyers still search Google, but more of the shortlist now gets built inside ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews. If your product never shows up in those answers, you’re not even in the comparison. The good news: being cited is less mysterious than it looks. It’s mostly classic SEO discipline, pointed at a new kind of reader.
Find the prompts your buyers ask
Start from conversations, not keyword tools. Pull phrasing from sales calls, support tickets and community threads, then rewrite each pain point the way someone would type it into an assistant. Group them by intent: “best tool for”, “X vs Y”, “how do I”, “is X worth it”.
best analytics tool for a B2B SaaS startup
[your category] vs [competitor] for small teams
how do I track product activation without engineers
is [your product] worth it for a 10-person teamCheck who gets cited today
Run every prompt in each assistant and log what comes back: which brands are named, which pages are linked, and what kind of page it is. Patterns show up fast.
| Prompt | ChatGPT | Perplexity | AI Overviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| best analytics tool for B2B SaaS | Competitor A | Competitor A, B | Roundup article |
| your category vs competitor | Competitor blog | G2 page | Not shown |
| how to track activation | Docs page | Reddit thread | You? |
Write the page an assistant wants to quote
Assistants quote pages that answer cleanly and can be trusted. For each prompt cluster, publish one page that does the job better than whatever is cited today.
- Answer the question in the first two sentences, in plain words.
- Use the buyer’s phrasing in the H1 and subheads.
- Back it with specifics: pricing, limits, who it’s for and who it isn’t.
- Add FAQ and product schema, and keep facts dated and current.
- Link it from your docs, comparisons and homepage so it’s easy to find.
“Answer first, then earn the right to explain. Assistants skim like busy buyers do.”
Earn mentions where assistants look
Your own site is only part of the picture. Assistants lean heavily on third-party sources: review platforms, “best of” roundups, newsletters, Reddit and community threads. Make a list of the sources cited in step 02 and work through them like a PR plan: get reviewed, get included, show up in the conversation.
Let the AI crawlers in
Plenty of sites block AI search crawlers by accident through an old robots.txt rule or a CDN bot setting. If they can’t read your pages, they can’t cite them. Check your robots.txt and firewall rules for the search crawlers you want to allow:
# robots.txt
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /Track it every month
Re-run the same prompt list monthly and record your share of answers per assistant. Answers change often, so the trend matters more than any single run. When a page starts getting cited, find the next cluster and repeat.