There is a new question businesses are beginning to ask about their online visibility.
“How do I get ChatGPT to mention my business?”
It is usually followed by similar questions. How do I appear in Gemini? How do I get included in Google AI Overviews? How do I make Microsoft Copilot recommend my company? Is there somewhere I can submit my business to AI?
These are reasonable questions because the way people discover businesses is changing.
A potential customer might still search Google for “website design company South Africa”, but they might also open ChatGPT and ask, “Can you recommend companies that build affordable websites for small businesses in South Africa?”
Someone looking for skincare might ask Gemini to compare several brands. A business owner might ask an AI assistant which accounting software is suitable for a small South African company. Someone planning a holiday might ask for recommended hotels rather than visiting a search engine and researching each one individually.
In all of these situations, AI has started occupying a position that search engines, review websites, publishers and comparison platforms traditionally occupied.
Naturally, businesses want to know how they can become part of those answers.
The answer is slightly more complicated than submitting your website somewhere and waiting for ChatGPT to recommend you.
You Cannot Simply Ask AI to Recommend Your Business
The first thing businesses need to understand is that there is no guaranteed button for getting mentioned in an AI-generated answer.
OpenAI explicitly says that any public website can potentially appear in ChatGPT search, but placement is not guaranteed. For content to be discoverable for ChatGPT Search, publishers should ensure that OAI-SearchBot is not being blocked from crawling their website.
Google takes a similar approach with its AI search experiences. Google says there are no special additional technical requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode beyond the normal requirements for appearing in Google Search. A page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search, but meeting those requirements does not guarantee that it will be selected.
This tells us something important.
AI visibility needs to be earned.
You cannot simply tell an AI system that your business is the best web design company, restaurant, retailer, consultant or beauty brand and expect it to accept that claim.
You need to give these systems enough reliable information to understand who you are, what you do and why your business might be relevant to the question being asked.
Start by Making Sure Your Business Can Be Found
Before worrying about whether AI will recommend your business, make sure it can actually find and understand your website.
This sounds obvious, but it is where many businesses already fail.
Your website should clearly state your business name, what you do, the products or services you provide, the locations you serve and how customers can contact you.
Your important pages should also be accessible to search engines and relevant search crawlers.
For ChatGPT specifically, OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot to access your website if you want your content to be eligible for inclusion in ChatGPT search results.
For Google, the traditional SEO fundamentals remain important because Google’s generative AI search experiences are connected to its existing search and quality systems. Google specifically says that SEO best practices remain foundational to success in generative AI search.
This is one of the reasons I don’t believe businesses should abandon SEO and suddenly redirect their entire marketing budgets towards something labelled “GEO”.
Good AI visibility begins with good digital visibility.
If search engines struggle to understand your business, your website contains very little useful information and nobody else on the internet talks about your company, getting consistently mentioned in AI-generated answers is going to be difficult.
Make It Extremely Clear What Your Business Does
Businesses sometimes become unnecessarily creative when describing themselves.
A homepage might proudly announce:
“Creating transformative experiences through innovative solutions.”
Lovely.
But what do you actually do?
Are you an accountant? A software company? A marketing agency? A furniture manufacturer? A motivational speaker?
Your website should make these things obvious.
If you are a Johannesburg-based company providing solar installations to residential and commercial customers, say exactly that.
If you manufacture corporate clothing and provide bulk printing services throughout South Africa, explain that clearly.
If you specialise in SEO for ecommerce businesses, make that part of your website’s content.
This clarity helps customers, search engines and AI systems establish an understanding of your business.
The aim is not to repeat the same keyword fifty times. The aim is to create a consistent and accurate picture of who your business is and what it is known for.
You Need More Than a Homepage and a Services Page
If you want your business to become a source within AI-generated answers, your website needs to contain information worth using.
Imagine two companies offering exactly the same service.
Company A has a homepage, About page, Contact page and Services page.
Company B has those same pages, but it also publishes detailed industry guides, original research, case studies, customer questions, comparisons, practical advice and expert commentary.
Which company gives an AI search system more information to work with?
Probably Company B.
This is where content strategy becomes extremely important to AI visibility.
Your website should answer the questions people ask before they buy from you.
If you are an accountant, explain tax, bookkeeping, company registration and common financial mistakes.
If you are a web designer, explain website costs, hosting, domains, maintenance, ecommerce platforms, website security and conversion optimisation.
If you sell beauty products, create genuinely useful information about ingredients, skin concerns, routines and product selection.
You are effectively building a knowledge base around your business’s area of expertise.
Become a Source, Not Just a Seller
One of the biggest opportunities in AI search is becoming a source of information.
Businesses naturally want their websites to sell.
There is nothing wrong with that.
But if every page on your website essentially says “buy from us because we are amazing”, you are not contributing much information to the wider internet.
Instead, publish things that somebody could genuinely learn from.
Share what you know.
Explain complicated topics.
Publish useful statistics.
Conduct surveys.
Analyse trends.
Create original research.
Publish case studies.
Share lessons from projects.
Compare approaches honestly.
Answer difficult industry questions.
The more original and useful your information becomes, the more reasons search systems have to retrieve it.
Google’s latest guidance on generative AI search specifically emphasises valuable, unique and non-commodity content. In other words, simply reproducing information that exists everywhere else is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate.
AI can already summarise generic information exceptionally well.
What it still needs is good source material.
Other Websites Talking About You Matters
Your own website is only one part of your online identity.
Think about it from the perspective of somebody researching a business.
If a company claims on its own website that it is one of the country’s leading providers of a particular service, that is marketing.
If respected publications, industry organisations, customers and independent websites also talk about that company, we now have external evidence.
The same principle matters in AI search.
Your business should exist beyond its own domain.
This might include legitimate media coverage, industry directories, professional associations, interviews, podcasts, conferences, customer reviews, supplier websites, business profiles and mentions from relevant publications.
This does not mean buying hundreds of questionable backlinks or paying random websites to publish articles saying that you are the “number one company in South Africa.”
That is simply old-fashioned link spam wearing an AI hat.
The objective should be to build a genuine digital footprint around the business.
Reviews Can Help Build That Digital Footprint
Customer reviews are particularly valuable because they provide information about a business that does not come directly from the business itself.
Reviews can help establish what customers associate with your company.
Perhaps customers consistently mention excellent delivery. Maybe they talk about your customer service, product quality, affordability or specialist knowledge.
Those conversations contribute to the broader information available about your business online.
For local businesses especially, keeping business profiles, addresses, contact details, operating hours and other information accurate across the web is important. Microsoft, for example, recommends maintaining accurate local business information as AI-powered experiences increasingly surface answers to location-based questions.
The important thing is consistency.
Your company should not have one name on its website, another variation on Google, an old address on a directory and completely different contact information somewhere else.
Build Authority Around a Specific Subject
Trying to become known for everything usually results in being known for nothing.
AI visibility is likely to reward businesses that have strong associations with particular subjects.
If your business specialises in technical SEO, build deep expertise around technical SEO.
If you manufacture school uniforms, build useful information around school uniforms, fabrics, sizing, manufacturing, embroidery, printing and bulk ordering.
If your business specialises in commercial solar installations, publish useful information around commercial solar.
Over time, you are building an association between your business and a subject.
Your website architecture should support this too.
Rather than publishing random articles because a keyword tool says they have search volume, build connected groups of useful information around the areas where your business genuinely has expertise.
This is topical authority, and it makes far more sense than trying to manufacture hundreds of unrelated articles.
Original Information Gives AI Something to Cite
This is where businesses have a huge opportunity.
Suppose you run an ecommerce company and analyse 100,000 internal searches to identify what South African customers are searching for.
That is information nobody else has.
Perhaps you operate a recruitment company and publish salary trends based on thousands of placements.
Maybe you are a property company and analyse rental prices across several neighbourhoods.
Perhaps your agency publishes data showing how website conversion rates changed after improving page speed across 50 client websites.
Now you have created something original.
Other publishers might reference it.
Journalists might cite it.
Industry websites might discuss it.
People might link to it.
And AI search systems have something valuable to retrieve when somebody asks a related question.
Original information gives you something that cannot simply be copied from the first page of Google.
Make Your Content Easy to Quote and Understand
Good writing matters too.
You don’t need to write like a machine for a machine to understand you.
In fact, please don’t.
Write naturally, but structure your information properly.
Use descriptive headings. Answer questions clearly. Explain terminology. Support claims with evidence. Use tables where comparisons genuinely benefit from tables. Keep paragraphs focused and make important facts easy to identify.
Microsoft’s guidance around AI citations similarly recommends clear structure, evidence, current information and strong subject depth as ways publishers can improve how their content participates in AI-generated answers.
The goal is not to produce robotic content designed for an imaginary AI crawler.
The goal is to make your expertise clear enough that both humans and machines can understand it.
Structured Data Helps Provide Context
Structured data can also help search engines understand the entities represented on your website.
Depending on your website, this might include information about your organisation, products, articles, events or other appropriate entities.
However, structured data should support the information on the page rather than attempt to manipulate search systems.
There is no magical “ChatGPT schema” that guarantees your business will appear in AI-generated answers.
Google has been particularly clear that businesses do not need special AI-specific technical optimisations to appear in its generative search experiences. Existing SEO best practices remain the foundation.
Keep Publishing, Updating and Improving
Authority is rarely created by publishing five articles in one weekend and abandoning the blog for two years.
Your website should evolve with your business and your industry.
Update outdated guides.
Improve articles when new information becomes available.
Publish new research.
Add new case studies.
Answer new customer questions.
Expand subjects where you have gained additional experience.
Remove information that is no longer accurate.
This creates a website that becomes more useful over time rather than simply becoming bigger.
There is an important difference between having a lot of content and having a lot of useful content.
The second one is what matters.
Start Measuring AI Visibility
The good news is that measuring AI visibility is slowly becoming more practical.
OpenAI says publishers can track referral traffic from ChatGPT because referral URLs include a utm_source=chatgpt.com parameter.
Microsoft has gone further with AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools, which can show publishers how often their pages are cited across supported AI experiences, which URLs receive citations and some of the grounding queries associated with those citations.
Google has also started rolling out dedicated generative AI performance reporting in Search Console for some websites, providing greater visibility into impressions from features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode.
This is important because AI visibility should eventually become something businesses monitor alongside traditional organic search performance.
Instead of measuring only rankings, impressions and clicks, we will increasingly want to understand citations, mentions, referral traffic and visibility within AI-generated answers.
Don’t Try to Manipulate AI Recommendations
Whenever a new marketing channel becomes important, somebody develops a shortcut.
AI search will be no different.
There will be agencies promising guaranteed ChatGPT mentions. There will be software claiming to submit businesses directly to AI models. There will be questionable strategies involving mass-produced articles, fake reviews, artificial mentions and thousands of low-quality pages designed specifically for AI crawlers.
Be careful.
AI search systems will continue changing.
A loophole that appears to work today may disappear tomorrow.
A much stronger strategy is to build the type of digital presence that remains valuable regardless of which search interface becomes dominant.
Be discoverable. Be useful. Be credible. Be consistent.
Those principles survived traditional search, and they make just as much sense in AI search.
You Need to Give AI a Reason to Mention You
Ultimately, getting your business mentioned in AI-generated answers is not about convincing ChatGPT that your company is wonderful.
It is about creating enough reliable evidence online for search and AI systems to understand what your business does, what it knows and why it might be relevant.
That starts with a technically accessible website and strong SEO foundations.
It continues with clear information about your business, useful content, topical expertise, original research, customer reviews, credible external mentions and consistent business information across the web.
And then comes patience.
You cannot control every answer generated by ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Google’s AI experiences. Different questions can produce different sources and different recommendations.
What you can control is the quality of the digital footprint your business leaves behind.
So instead of asking only:
“How do I get ChatGPT to mention my business?”
Ask a better question:
“Have we given ChatGPT, Gemini, Google and the rest of the web enough credible information to understand why our business is worth mentioning?”
If the answer is no, that is where the work begins.
Because the businesses that become visible in AI search will not simply be the ones shouting the loudest.
They will be the ones giving AI the strongest reasons to include them in the answer.