How to get your business cited by AI search

A customer used to find you in three steps: type a question into Google, scan ten results, click yours. Two of those steps are quietly disappearing. Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity "who does branding for restaurants in Cluj?" and you don't get ten links — you get a paragraph, with two or three businesses named inside it. If your name is in that paragraph, you've won before the competition even loads. If it isn't, you don't exist for that buyer.

This isn't a far-off prediction. Google now puts an AI Overview above the normal results for a growing share of searches, ChatGPT browses the live web, and Perplexity is built entirely around cited answers. The mechanics of "getting found" have changed — but, crucially, they haven't become mysterious. AI answers are assembled from sources these tools trust. The whole game is becoming one of those sources. Below is exactly how that works, and what to actually do.

Why AI quotes some businesses and ignores others

People assume getting into AI answers is a black box. It isn't. When you ask ChatGPT or Perplexity a question, the tool runs a search behind the scenes, pulls a handful of pages it judges relevant and credible, reads them, and writes a summary that names what it found. This new discipline has an ugly name — GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) or AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) — but the idea is simple: you're optimising to be retrieved and quoted, not just ranked.

Three things decide whether you make the cut:

• Can the model read you clearly? If your offering is buried in a slideshow, an image, or vague marketing poetry, the AI can't extract a clean fact to repeat.
• Do you directly answer the question being asked? AI rewards pages built around a real question with a real, self-contained answer — not pages built around a keyword.
• Is the claim corroborated elsewhere? A model is far more willing to name a business that several independent sources describe the same way. One self-made claim is a brochure; the same claim echoed across your site, your Google profile, a directory and a review is a fact.

Ranking on Google was about being the best link. Being cited by AI is about being the clearest, most corroborated source. Those overlap — but they aren't the same job.

The seven things that actually move the needle

If you do nothing else, do these. We've ordered them roughly by effort-to-impact — the early ones are quick wins most small businesses skip.

1. Answer real questions in plain, self-contained sentences

AI models love a page that asks the exact question a customer would ("How much does a kitchen renovation cost in Cluj?") and answers it in the first two sentences, before any preamble. Write the answer so it makes sense lifted out of context, because that's exactly what happens — the model copies a sentence into its summary. Lead with the answer, then explain. Kill the throat-clearing intros.

2. Make your facts unambiguous and consistent

What you do, who you do it for, where you operate, what it costs, how to reach you — state these as clear facts, in words, in the same way everywhere. If your homepage says "creative solutions for ambitious brands" and nothing else, the AI has nothing concrete to repeat. "We design brand identities and websites for restaurants and hotels in Transylvania" is a sentence a model can confidently quote.

3. Add structured data (schema) so machines read you correctly

Schema markup is invisible code that labels your content for machines: this is the business name, this is the service, this is the price, this is a review. It removes guesswork. At minimum, mark up your organisation, your services, your local business details and any FAQs. It won't make a bad page good, but it makes a clear page unmissable to the systems doing the retrieving.

4. Get your Google Business Profile and the big directories right

For anything local — and most SMEs are local — AI tools lean heavily on your Google Business Profile and a handful of trusted directories. Make sure your category, service area, hours and description are complete and identical across every listing. Inconsistent NAP (name, address, phone) across the web is the single most common reason a model hedges instead of naming you.

5. Earn third-party mentions that say the same thing

Models trust corroboration. A mention in a local publication, an industry directory, a partner's site or a genuine customer review does more for AI citation than another page on your own domain. You don't need press releases — you need to be described, accurately, in places other than your own website. Reviews matter doubly here: they're independent, specific, and full of the exact language customers use to ask questions.

6. Keep the technical foundation clean

If the AI's crawler can't load your page quickly, or your content only appears after heavy JavaScript, you may simply never be read. Fast load times, server-rendered text, a sane site structure and a crawlable sitemap aren't glamorous, but they're the price of entry. A page that humans can see but machines can't is a page that doesn't exist for AI search.

7. Publish genuinely useful content — then keep it current

The pages that get quoted are the ones that genuinely help: comparisons, honest guides, real pricing context, answers to the awkward questions customers actually have. Thin, keyword-stuffed filler is invisible to AI and increasingly to Google too. And because these tools favour fresh information, a guide you update beats a guide you abandon.

A starter checklist you can run this week

None of these require a developer or a budget. They're the first afternoon of the work.

What not to waste your time on

The novelty of AI search has already produced a lot of snake oil. A few things to ignore:

• "Submit your site to ChatGPT" services. There's no submission queue. You earn your way in by being a clear, trusted source — not by paying a middleman.
• Stuffing pages with the phrase "AI" or "as an AI language model". Models aren't fooled by keyword tricks; they're trained against them.
• Spinning out hundreds of thin AI-written pages. Volume without substance gets you filtered, on Google and in AI answers alike. One excellent page outperforms fifty hollow ones.
• Obsessing over a single tool. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI draw from overlapping sources. Do the fundamentals well and you show up across all of them.

How long does it take, honestly?

The quick wins — a complete Google profile, clear answer-first pages, consistent facts — can change your AI visibility within weeks, because these tools read the live web. The deeper compounding effect — third-party mentions, reviews, authority — builds over months, exactly like classic SEO. We won't promise you'll be the top citation by Friday. We will say this: the businesses doing this work now are claiming ground while their competitors still think AI search is a gimmick. That window won't stay open.

The cost of getting cited by AI today is mostly effort and clarity. In two years it'll be effort, clarity and a crowd. Early is cheap.

Where Cittago fits

We're a small studio in Cluj-Napoca, and we've spent fifteen years getting businesses found — first on Google, now inside AI answers too. We do the unglamorous parts properly: the technical clean-up, the answer-first content, the schema, the profile and review work, and the patient corroboration that makes a model confident enough to name you. No jargon, no dashboards you need a decoder ring for — just a clear picture of where you stand today and what it takes to become the answer people get.

If you'd like to see whether AI tools currently mention you — and what it would take to fix it if they don't — that's a fifteen-minute conversation worth having. Read more about our SEO & AI Search service, or just book a time below and we'll check it together.