AI SEO in 2026: how to get your business cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity

Search is splitting in two. People still type queries into Google, but a fast-growing share now ask an assistant — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews — "who is the best orthodontist near me?" or "which agency should I hire to rebuild my website?". If your business isn't legible to those models, you simply don't exist in the answer.

The good news: the work that earns AI citations is mostly good SEO done properly, plus a few extra habits. Here's what we do for our own site and for clients.

1. Make your entity unambiguous

Language models are trained on and retrieve from text. They need to know, with no ambiguity, who you are, what you do, where you do it and for whom.

• State it plainly on your home and about pages: "The Dev Studio is a web design and development agency founded in 2011, serving clients in the UK, Australia, Europe and North America."
• Use the same name, address and phone (NAP) everywhere: website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories.
• Publish Organization, LocalBusiness/ProfessionalService and Person (founder) structured data with sameAs links to your social profiles.

2. Answer real questions, in full sentences, on the page

AI answers are stitched together from passages. Pages that contain a clear question followed by a direct, self-contained answer get quoted far more often than marketing fluff.

• Add an FAQ block to every service page and mark it up with FAQPage schema.
• Lead each answer with the fact ("Our packages start at $299") before the nuance.
• Keep headings descriptive and literal: "How long does a website take to build?" beats "Our process".

3. Fix the technical foundations

If a crawler can't render or reach your content, no amount of copywriting helps.

• Server-render or statically generate your pages (we use Next.js). Client-only React apps are often invisible to retrieval crawlers.
• Keep robots.txt open to AI crawlers you want (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) — and decide deliberately if you don't.
• Publish an llms.txt file: a concise, plain-text summary of your site with links to the pages that matter.
• Ship an accurate XML sitemap and clean canonical URLs.

4. Earn mentions off your site

Models trust what multiple independent sources say. Reviews on Google, case studies on clients' sites, directory listings, guest articles and LinkedIn posts all reinforce the same facts about your business.

5. Measure it

Ask the assistants yourself, monthly: "Who builds websites for orthodontists in the UK?" Note whether you appear and what source they cite. Track referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com in GA4.

Where to start

If you only do three things: write unambiguous entity statements on your home and about pages, add FAQ sections with schema to your service pages, and make sure your site is server-rendered and fast. That's the foundation we build into every site — talk to us if you'd like it done for yours.