Here is the situation. Your buyers used to google "best accounting software for small business" and click through ten blue links. Now a growing chunk of them just asks ChatGPT, gets a shortlist of three to five names, and starts their evaluation there. If your brand is in that shortlist, you are in the deal. If it is not, you never even existed.
The good news is that getting into those answers is not magic, and it is not a lottery. AI engines pick their sources in fairly predictable ways. The bad news is that most of what is sold as "AI SEO" right now is snake oil. So let me walk you through what actually works, the same way I would explain it to a friend who runs a SaaS and just asked me about this over a beer.
First, understand how the answer gets made
When someone asks ChatGPT a buying question, two things can happen. Either the model answers from what it learned during training, which means it recalls brands it has seen described consistently across the web. Or it runs a live web search, reads the top results, and assembles an answer with citations. Perplexity and Google AI Overviews work mostly in that second mode. ChatGPT does both, and its search runs on Bing. Claude searches the live web too, through Anthropic's own crawlers, and the same logic applies to it.
That one paragraph explains the whole playbook. You need to be memorable to the models (consistent presence across the web) and retrievable by them (rank in the sources they search, in a format they can quote). Everything below serves one of those two goals.
Step 1: Find out where you stand today
Before you change anything, get a baseline. Write down ten questions your actual buyers would ask an AI. Not keywords, questions. Things like "what is the best CRM for a 10 person agency" or "alternatives to [big competitor] that are cheaper". Now ask all ten in ChatGPT, in Claude, in Perplexity, and in Google with AI Overviews on. For every answer, note three things: which brands get named, which sources get cited, and whether you appear at all.
Save it in a spreadsheet with the date. This takes half an hour and it is the most clarifying half hour you will spend this quarter. We wrote a full walkthrough of this in our DIY AI visibility audit if you want the detailed version.
Step 2: Fix your Bing situation
Nobody has cared about Bing since 2009. Start caring. ChatGPT search is built on Bing, which means if you are invisible there, you are invisible to the fastest growing answer engine in the world. Set up Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, and check that your key pages are actually indexed. While you are at it, complete your Bing Places listing if you have any local presence. This is boring work and it takes an afternoon, and for most brands it is the single fastest win on this list.
Step 3: Give the engines something worth quoting
AI engines cite pages that answer the question directly. Not pages that wind up to the answer after 800 words of preamble. Pick the one page on your site that should be cited for your money question and rebuild it like this: the direct answer in the first paragraph, a clear stat or number the engine can lift, headings that match how people actually phrase questions, and schema markup so machines can verify what the page claims.
Original data deserves a special mention here. If you publish a number that exists nowhere else, like a benchmark from your own customer base, engines have to cite you when they use it. That is the strongest citation magnet there is. It is also exactly the kind of content that earns links from humans, which feeds back into everything. Our SaaS SEO guide covers how to build these pages so they rank in classic search too, because the two games overlap almost entirely.
Step 4: Get your story straight, everywhere
Models cross check. If your site says you are "an AI powered analytics platform" and your LinkedIn says "business intelligence consultancy" and some directory from 2019 says "data services agency", the model shrugs and cites someone whose story adds up. Write down your canonical facts once: what you are, who you serve, what you cost, where you operate, when you were founded. Then go make your website, your social profiles, your directory listings and your review profiles all say the same thing. Add an llms.txt file to your site while you are at it. It is a small text file that tells AI crawlers what your site is about, and it costs you twenty minutes.
Step 5: Build receipts other people wrote
Here is the part most people skip because it is hard. Engines do not recommend brands on the brand's own say so. They look for corroboration: review platforms, industry listicles, community threads, press mentions. When ChatGPT recommends a SaaS, the citations are usually a G2 page, a couple of "best X tools" articles, and sometimes a Reddit thread. You want to exist in all three of those source types.
So get your review profiles active and current, because review recency matters more than review count. Pitch the credible listicles in your category, the ones that already rank, since those exact articles are what the engines retrieve. And participate honestly where your customers hang out. One genuinely helpful answer in the right subreddit outlives fifty promotional posts.
Step 6: Let the crawlers in and track the trend
Check your robots.txt for GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and friends. Plenty of sites blocked them in 2023 out of caution and forgot. Blocked crawler means no retrieval, means no citation. Then re run your ten question panel every month, same questions, same engines, and log the changes. Watch your analytics for referral traffic from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. The trend is your scoreboard, because no single answer is repeatable. These systems are probabilistic, and anyone who promises you a guaranteed spot in ChatGPT is selling you the 2010s with a new coat of paint.
The honest summary
Getting cited by AI is mostly being the best retrievable, most corroborated source in your niche. Which is to say, it is SEO discipline pointed at a new surface. If your fundamentals are weak, fix those first. If they are strong, the six steps above will compound within a quarter or two. And if you would rather have someone run the whole system for you, that is literally what our AI SEO service does, prompt panel and all.