article · HOW TO GET CITED BY CHATGPT
How CitationsActually Happen.
Answer engines quote pages they can reach, parse and trust. Three of those are engineering, and most businesses fail the first one without knowing it.
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01 · how does chatgpt choose sources
How ChatGPT chooses its sources.
When an assistant answers a question about a real business, it searches, retrieves a handful of pages, and quotes the ones that answer the question most directly. It is retrieval, not memory, for anything current.
So the levers are the ones that always mattered, plus one new one. Be reachable by the crawlers these systems use, be unambiguous about who you are, answer questions in a form that can be lifted, and be corroborated somewhere other than your own website.
02 · generative engine optimization checks
Four checks that decide AI citations.
Can the crawlers reach you
Assistant crawlers are separate from Google's and many sites block them by accident, in robots.txt or at the firewall, often added by a security plugin nobody remembers installing. This is the most common single cause of a business being absent from AI answers, and it is a five minute fix.
Is the content in the HTML
If your service list and location only appear after JavaScript runs, expect them to be missed. Text in the page source gets quoted. Text assembled in a browser often does not.
Is the answer liftable
One question as a heading, the answer in the first two sentences under it, in plain words, with the entity named rather than implied. Long preambles do not get quoted.
Does anyone else say it
Assistants weight corroboration. Your Google Business Profile, your directory listings, a chamber page, a news mention, a review site. Claims that appear only on your own domain carry the least weight.
03 · how to check if ai mentions your business
How to check if AI cites you.
Ask the assistants the questions your buyers ask, in the words your buyers use, without naming your business. Best CPA for a small practice in The Valley. Who handles a case like this near me. Then read who gets named and follow the citations.
Do it in two or three assistants and write down the answers with the date. That list is your baseline, and it is the only honest way to tell later whether anything changed.
04 · geo vs seo
How GEO differs from SEO.
Eighty percent of it is the same work. The pages have to be reachable, fast, clearly about one thing and worth reading. There is no separate discipline behind most of what gets sold as a new service here, and the category cannot agree on a name for itself.
The genuinely new parts are narrow: crawler access for assistant bots, passage level formatting so answers can be lifted, entity clarity so the machine knows which business you are, and monitoring what the assistants say about you. Anyone selling far more than that is selling the name.
05 · ai citation questions
AI citation questions.