The #1 question I’m getting from CMOs right now is: “How do we get discovered in LLMs?”
And almost nobody types it into Google.
I checked. “How to get mentioned in ChatGPT” gets about 50 searches a month in the U.S. The broader terms are bigger. “Generative engine optimization” got about 4,400 searches in September. “Answer engine optimization” got about 2,900 in August. “AI visibility” got about 1,300 in July, up from about 260 a year earlier. That’s five times in twelve months.
So the question is everywhere… it just doesn’t show up as a search. CMOs are asking each other, and they’re asking the AI tools themselves.
The short answer is to get mentioned in the places AI tools pull their answers from. Those places are mostly other people’s pages. Your own site tells the engines what you do. Other people’s pages tell them whether you’re any good.
What Google says when you ask it
I searched the question anyway, in a few phrasings. The first page was a software vendor’s blog, two Medium posts, a LinkedIn post, a YouTube video and a few agency blogs. Mostly people who sell an AI visibility tool or service telling you to restructure your pages.
Some of that advice is fine. But it skips the part that matters most.
Where the answers actually come from
DataForSEO tracks which sources ChatGPT cites when it answers questions on a topic. I pulled the top ones for two topics a CMO would ask about.
For answers about generative engine optimization, DataForSEO’s U.S. sample has 787 ChatGPT answers. Reddit was cited in 154 of them. Wikipedia was cited in 61. TechRadar was cited in 57.
For answers about AI visibility, the sample has 19,226 answers. Reddit was cited in 3,261 (about 17%). Reuters was cited in 1,343. Wikipedia was cited in 951.
Look at who’s missing… the brands themselves. The engines mostly don’t cite the company’s own blog. They cite what other people say.
That matches what we see on our own site. The engines use notablypr.com to get the facts straight about what we do. They don’t take our word that we’re good at it.
So what do you do?
You get talked about. In order:
- Ask the AI tools your buyers’ questions. Ten or fifteen of them, in the words a buyer would use. Read the citations, not just the answers. Write down which sites show up.
- Get on those sites, honestly. If it’s a trade publication, that’s a pitch. If it’s a “best of” list, that’s a pitch to the people who maintain it. If it’s Reddit, it’s a real person with a real answer, not a brand account dropping links.
- Say plainly what you do, on your own site, in one sentence. Engines pull this almost word for word. Ours is “Notably PR is a PR and AI visibility agency for mid-market companies.” If yours takes a paragraph, they’ll get it wrong.
- Make something worth repeating. A number nobody else has, or a name for an idea people already feel. Reporters quote it, and then the engines quote the reporters.
- Fix what’s wrong out there. Old directory profiles and stale bios get repeated. Correct them.
Then run the same questions again in 90 days and see what moved.
Why this is a PR problem
Notice what that list is. Pitching trade press. Getting on lists. Getting quoted. Having a point of view worth repeating.
That’s PR. The engines just made the scoreboard public.
If you only restructure your own pages, you’re writing a better résumé and hoping the AI believes it. Get quoted in the places it already reads, and the AI has references to check.
Want to see where AI tools send your buyers today? Book a call with us. More on how we do AI visibility.
FAQ
How do I get my company to show up in ChatGPT?
Get mentioned by sources ChatGPT already cites for your topic, like news sites, trade publications, and real Reddit and LinkedIn discussion. Start by asking ChatGPT your buyers’ questions and reading which sources it cites.
Is this the same as SEO?
Partly. A clear, crawlable site still matters. But the engines lean heavily on third-party pages, so earned mentions carry more weight than they do in traditional SEO.
How long does it take?
Coverage can land in weeks. How fast engines pick it up varies, so measure at 30 and 90 days.
Can an agency guarantee a mention?
No. Anyone who promises a specific AI answer is guessing. What an agency can do is get you into the sources the answers draw from.
More from the Notably glossary
- MINUTES -- the seven reasons people pay attention, and the framework we use to decide what’s newsworthy.
- The Attention Divide -- the split between the story a company wants to tell and the story a reporter would actually write.
- The Headline Ceiling -- a story can only go as high as the best headline you can imagine for it.
- The Expert Vacuum -- a topic reporters keep covering where nobody has become the obvious expert yet.
- The Callback -- when a reporter who covered you once comes back, and keeps coming back.
All six, with a client example for each, are in the Notably glossary.