Start by finding out where you stand
Before changing anything, check three things: whether AI models know your brand from memory, whether search-backed assistants find and cite your site, and whether your name comes up when buyers ask category questions. The five-minute version is in /blog/how-to-check-if-chatgpt-knows-your-brand. The answer tells you which of the steps below matter most for you.
1. Let AI crawlers in
Nothing else works if the crawlers can't read your pages. Check your robots.txt for GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, and remove blanket blocks you didn't intend. Our free check at /tools/robots grades seventeen AI crawlers in seconds. Effort: minutes. Impact: everything else depends on it.
2. Tell machines who you are
Add Organization schema to your homepage with sameAs links to every official profile, so crawlers can connect your site, your LinkedIn page and your listings as one entity. Full example in /blog/organization-schema-sameas-for-ai. Effort: twenty minutes. Impact: high, and it compounds as you add profiles.
3. Exist where buyers and AI look for recommendations
AI answers to "best X for Y" questions lean heavily on independent sources: review sites, comparison articles and community discussion. Get listed on the two or three review or directory sites that matter in your category — G2 or Capterra for software, Clutch for agencies, Google Business Profile and Yelp for local businesses — with the same description everywhere. Ask real customers for honest reviews. Never buy or incentivise them; it breaks platform rules and trust.
4. Answer the questions buyers actually ask
List the ten questions your customers type into AI assistants, in their words, not yours. Then make sure your site answers each one directly: a clear page per important question, the answer in the first paragraph, specifics rather than slogans, and honest comparison pages for "[competitor] alternatives" searches. Pages written this way are easy for a search-backed assistant to quote and cite.
5. Build a consistent identity record
Once there is independent coverage of your company, create a Wikidata item that lists your official website, with references. It helps systems tell you apart from similarly named organisations. Don't write or commission your own Wikipedia article — Wikipedia forbids it and deletes promotional pages. Earn coverage in trade press and news; an uninvolved editor may create the article when it exists.
6. Join the conversation, openly
Reddit threads and Q&A sites are among the sources assistants cite most for recommendations. Answer genuinely helpful questions where your product is relevant, and say who you are. Undisclosed promotion gets removed and damages the brand you are trying to build.
7. Measure properly, then repeat
Track the same buyer questions across several engines, over weeks, with enough answers to separate change from noise (/blog/is-your-geo-working). For each fix, compare its own prompt before and after publishing, and watch for engines citing the page itself.
What to expect, and when
Search-backed answers — Perplexity, AI assistants with web search turned on, Google's AI Overviews — can reflect these changes within days or weeks of the pages being crawled. Models answering from memory lag until they are retrained, on the vendor's schedule. Plan for both: quick wins in search-backed answers now, and a well-corroborated web presence ready for the next training cycle.
What to skip
Keyword-stuffed pages written for machines, bulk AI-generated articles, hidden text aimed at crawlers, and fake reviews. Search engines penalise them, assistants discount them, and none of them builds the independent corroboration that actually gets brands named.
Anovox runs this whole loop for you: an AI Awareness audit that turns gaps into a ranked plan, tracking across engines with honest ranges, drafts for the pages you need, and before-and-after proof for every fix. Start free at /onboarding.
See this on your own brand
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