How to Improve Your Brand's Mentions in AI Answers: A Practical Playbook

There is no setting that makes ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity recommend you. What you can do is change the material they draw on, and measure whether it worked. This playbook covers the steps in order. (The discipline is called GEO, sometimes AEO or LLM optimization; see What is GEO?.)

1. Measure a baseline first

Without a starting number you cannot tell whether anything helped. Build a fixed set of buyer-style questions (category, comparison and problem-led, not your brand name) and record mention rate, ranking position and sentiment per platform. Our guide to tracking brand mentions in ChatGPT shows how, and AI visibility score explained covers how to read the results.

2. Find out what the answers are built from

Assistants that search the web show their sources; for the others, sources appear indirectly in how they describe the category. Collect the pages that come up repeatedly for your category: "best of" lists, review sites, comparison articles, forum threads, directories. That list is your target list.

3. Show up where the answers come from

For each source on the list, ask what it would take to be included accurately:

• Review and directory sites: create or complete your listing, and keep it current.
• "Best of" and comparison articles: the authors are people. Give them something worth including: a clear description, accurate facts, a way to try the product.
• Communities: take part honestly. Answer questions, disclose your affiliation, and do not seed fake posts.
• Press and partners: integrations, partner pages and genuine coverage all count as independent mentions.

Models tend to repeat what many independent sources say, so breadth of genuine third-party coverage matters more than volume on your own site.

4. Make your own site easy to quote

• State plainly what the product is, who it is for and what category it belongs to, in the first paragraph of key pages.
• Add a factual FAQ and comparison pages that answer the questions buyers ask.
• Keep the important content in server-rendered HTML rather than behind client-side loading, so crawlers can read it.
• Use consistent naming, pricing and feature descriptions everywhere.

5. Fix contradictions

Old pricing, a former product name or a wrong category on a third-party page can get you skipped or misdescribed. Audit the top sources for stale facts and ask for corrections.

6. Avoid shortcuts

Fake reviews, hidden text and mass-produced posts are easy to detect, damage trust with humans as well as machines, and can get pages removed. They are not worth the risk.

7. Re-measure on a schedule, and be patient

Re-run the same questions weekly and judge the trend over several weeks. Independent sites need time to publish and be re-crawled, and individual answers vary, so expect movement to be gradual and uneven.

PeiGEO automates steps 1 and 7: it generates a tracking question set from your brand and competitors, runs it on a schedule across DeepSeek, Qwen, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and shows mention rate, ranking and sentiment over time, so you can see whether your work is moving the numbers. If a brand is missing entirely, start with why brands are not recommended by Perplexity.