Where AI tools get what they say about you
When someone asks an AI assistant to recommend an accountant or compare two suppliers, the answer draws on two sources:
How an AI tool might come to mention a business
- 1Consistent factsYour name, offer and details match everywhere.
- 2Trusted sourcesReputable sites and your own pages say the same thing.
- 3AI answerAn AI tool may mention you. Nobody can promise that it will.
- What the model learned in training: patterns from a very large amount of public text, such as websites, news, directories and reference pages, collected up to a cut-off date.
- Pages it looks up now: many tools, including ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot, search the web while they answer and list the pages they used.
Either way, the tool is weighing what is most likely to be true, and it can be wrong. A 2023 study (Aggarwal and others, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, arXiv:2311.09735) found that pages with clear facts, cited sources and quotations were cited more often in AI answers than pages that simply repeated keywords. If your details differ from one website to the next, a tool has less reason to trust any of them.
Say the same true things about yourself everywhere
To an AI tool, your business is one thing with a set of facts attached: its name, where it is, what it sells and who runs it. The more consistently those facts appear, the more likely they are to be repeated correctly. Check three things:
- Name and address: the same on your website, in company registers, on Google and in the directories that list you.
- What you do: described in the same plain words on every page. If one page calls you a "design studio" and another a "build partner", a tool may not know which is right.
- What others say: mentions in respected trade publications, reviews and partner websites back up what your own site says.
How AI tools choose what to cite is still being studied, and it changes every time the tools are updated. The same question can get a different answer tomorrow, so no technique can guarantee a mention.
Myths to ignore
AI search attracts a lot of claims that nobody can check. Three you will hear often:
- Myth 1: hidden instructions to AI tools work. Text hidden on a page for AI crawlers is widely filtered out, and hiding text can count against you in Google.
- Myth 2: someone can get you into the model. No agency can guarantee that a future AI model will be trained on your pages.
- Myth 3: more mentions always help. Listing yourself on hundreds of low-quality directories does not build trust. A few respected sources count for more.
What you can do
Instead of chasing tricks, work on things you can check:
- Publish what only you know: your own figures, methods and examples give AI tools something to cite that nobody else has.
- Label your business for search engines: add Organization structured data to your site, with links (called sameAs) to your official profiles and listings.
- Keep key pages easy to read: clear headings, short summaries and real tables, with the main text in the page itself rather than loaded later by scripts.
- Make your name hard to confuse: if your name is a common word, or another company shares it, say what you do and where in your page titles and opening lines. Our Search & AI Visibility service can check these details and fix them with you.
What to put on your own site
Assistants describe a business from what they can read about it. Make the facts easy to find and the same everywhere.
- Who you are, in one sentence, with your full business name.
- What you offer and where you offer it.
- Who it is for, and who it is not for.
- Prices or price ranges, if you can publish them.
- How to contact you and where you are based.
- Dates on pages that change, so a reader can tell what is current.
Then check the same facts on your social profiles, directories and press mentions. A difference between sources is what gives an assistant a wrong answer.
Questions people ask
Can I pay to be included in AI answers?
Paid placements are a separate matter from what an assistant says when it answers from its own sources. For those answers, clear, accurate and consistent information is the part you control.
Does an llms.txt file help?
Do not expect a file like that to change what assistants say about you. The facts on your own pages, and their consistency across the web, matter more.
Why does an assistant get my business wrong?
Usually because sources disagree, or because there is little to read. Fix the sources you control and publish the missing facts.
Try this on your own site in 10 minutes
Ask two or three AI assistants the same questions about your business.
- Ask "What does [your business name] do, and where?" and note what each tool gets right and wrong.
- Compare your name, address and phone number on your website, on Google and in your two biggest directory listings.
- Read the opening lines of your homepage. Would a stranger know what you do and where?
- List three respected websites that mention you. If you cannot think of any, that is your next job.