7 Things You Can Do This Week to Get Recommended by ChatGPT

Every brand wants the same thing now: when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for a recommendation in your category, you want your name in the answer.

The problem is most advice on this is vague hand-waving — "create great content," "build authority." Useless. So here's the opposite: seven concrete, do-it-this-week moves that actually influence whether AI assistants mention and recommend your brand.

This discipline has a name — AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), sometimes GEO. Think of it as SEO's sibling, tuned for a different machine. Let's get tactical.

1. Lock down your "canonical facts" first Before anything else, write down the exact, single source of truth for your brand: official name (with correct capitalization), one-sentence description, category, founding year, founders, headquarters, and website.

Why this comes first: AI models hate inconsistency. If your LinkedIn says one thing, Crunchbase another, and your site a third, the model gets confused — and confusion is how hallucinations and omissions happen. One consistent set of facts, used everywhere, is the foundation of everything below.

1. Add an llms.txt file to your site This is the fastest technical win almost no one has done yet. An llms.txt is a simple Markdown file at your root (yoursite.com/llms.txt) that tells AI crawlers what your site is, what your key pages are, and what you do — in clean, machine-readable form.

Stripe, Vercel, and Anthropic already publish one. It takes about an hour, and it gives AI a shortcut to understand you correctly instead of guessing from rendered HTML.

1. Check your robots.txt isn't blocking AI Here's a painful one: many brands are accidentally blocking the very bots they want to be seen by. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and make sure you're not disallowing AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended — unless you genuinely want to be invisible to them.

You can't be recommended by a model that was never allowed to read you.

1. Win the comparison queries AI loves to answer "X vs Y" questions — and it pulls from content that directly compares. If the only comparison articles about your category are written by competitors (or worse, by your competitor), guess whose framing the AI adopts.

Publish honest, detailed comparison content: "[You] vs [Competitor]," "best [category] for [use case]," "alternatives to [big name]." Be fair and specific — models reward substance, not spin.

1. Get cited by sources AI trusts Models weight authoritative, third-party mentions heavily. A single strong "best [category] tools" listicle on a respected site can do more for your AI visibility than ten pages on your own blog.

This week: identify the top 3–5 "best of" articles ranking for your category, and start the outreach to be included. Reviews, directories, and reputable roundups are the raw material AI learns from.

1. Add structured data and clear on-page facts Make it trivially easy for a machine to extract who you are. Add Organization and Product schema (JSON-LD). State your key facts in plain text on the page — not buried in an image or a video. The easier you are to parse, the more accurately you're represented.

Bonus: this also helps traditional SEO and Google's AI Overviews. One effort, two channels.

1. Measure it — then repeat what works Here's the move that separates brands that win from brands that guess: track your AI visibility over time.

Ask the AI engines your buyers' real questions on a schedule. Note whether you appear, where you rank versus competitors, and whether the sentiment is positive. When your score moves, you'll know which of moves 1–6 actually worked — and you can double down.

You can't optimize what you don't measure. Doing this once is a snapshot. Doing it weekly is a strategy.

The brutal truth about timing
None of these tactics are hard. The reason they're a competitive advantage is simply that almost no one is doing them yet.

AEO today is where SEO was in 2004 — wide open, cheap to win, and ignored by most brands. The ones who plant their flag now will own the AI answer for their category for years. The ones who wait will be trying to claw into an answer a competitor already owns.

Pick two of these seven and do them this week. Then check ChatGPT again in a month. You'll be surprised how fast the needle moves when you're one of the few who bothered.

I write about AI search and the shift from SEO to AEO. I'm building Sourceable, which tracks how AI assistants recommend your brand across ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. If this was useful, give it a clap and follow — more practical AEO playbooks coming.