How to Get Your Business Cited in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews

The way people find answers online has changed faster in the past two years than in the previous decade. Google AI Overviews now appear on roughly 30% of searches. ChatGPT fields millions of business-related questions daily. Perplexity has a significant share of research queries. All three cite specific sources — and right now, your competitors may be getting cited instead of you.

This is not about writing more content. It is about understanding how AI systems decide what to cite, then structuring your existing content to meet those criteria.

How AI Systems Decide What to Cite

AI systems do not cite randomly. They extract content from sources that meet specific structural criteria:

• The content directly answers the question asked — not just discusses the topic
• The answer is in the first sentence or two of the relevant section
• The source has some authority signal — links, mentions, or entity recognition
• The content uses factual, verifiable statements rather than opinions or promotional claims
• The page has schema markup that signals its content type and subject matter

The critical insight is that the answer must be extractable. AI systems cannot infer an answer from context — they need to see it stated directly. A paragraph that discusses why businesses struggle with marketing will not be cited as the answer to 'why does marketing spend not produce revenue'. A paragraph that begins 'Marketing spend fails to produce revenue when conversion tracking is broken, campaigns target broad keywords, or landing pages do not match ad intent' will be.

The Answer Capsule Format

The format that consistently produces AI citations is what we call the answer capsule: question as the heading, direct answer in the first sentence, supporting detail in the following 2–3 sentences, and — where applicable — a numbered process or comparison.

Here is an example of content that AI will not cite: 'There are many factors that contribute to poor marketing performance. Businesses often struggle with a variety of challenges including budget allocation, channel selection, and measurement. Understanding these factors requires careful analysis.'

Here is the same content restructured for AI citation: 'Marketing spend fails to produce revenue for three primary reasons: conversion tracking records the wrong events (so the algorithm optimises toward page visits instead of sales), keywords are too broad (attracting searchers without purchase intent), or landing pages do not match the intent of the ads driving traffic. Each cause requires a different fix.'