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How I got my own sites cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity

June 30, 2026

Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for recommendations in my categories and my sites come back by name: bipsutton.com for AI consulting questions in Indiana, bipsbites.com for its food niche. I did not buy that, and I did not get it from one weird trick. This post is the method, what the published evidence says actually mattered, and the popular tactics that did nothing, so you can skip them.

The short version

AI engines do not know who is good. At answer time they run web searches, read what comes back, and synthesize. So getting recommended reduces to three questions: can the engines retrieve you, is your content quotable when they do, and do other sources name you? Everything below serves one of those three.

What I did that the evidence supports

1. Made every engine's crawler welcome, especially Bing's. ChatGPT leans on Bing plus OpenAI's own crawler, Perplexity runs its own index, Claude grounds on Brave. A 68-run controlled test in 2026 found ChatGPT's citations aligned with Bing's results 87 percent of the time. I verified both sites in Bing Webmaster Tools, submitted URLs through IndexNow, and allowed OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and Claude's crawlers in robots.txt. Most small sites have never once looked at Bing. That alone is an edge.
2. Wrote pages that answer one question directly, answer first. Engines break your question into many hidden sub-queries and quote whoever wins each fragment. The peer-reviewed GEO study out of Princeton (KDD 2024, 10,000 queries) found adding statistics, quotations, and cited sources lifted content visibility in generated answers by up to 40 percent, and the lift was biggest for lower-ranked sites. Direct answer in the first 40 to 60 words, numbers over adjectives.
3. Made the entity boringly consistent. Same name, same location, same description of what I do, everywhere: site, LinkedIn, schema, business profiles. Engines cross-check sources before naming someone; contradictions read as risk. This is unglamorous and it matters.
4. Earned third-party mentions instead of chasing backlinks. Ahrefs' 75,000-brand study found plain-text brand mentions correlate with AI visibility at 0.66 to 0.74, while domain authority sits around 0.27 and raw backlinks at 0.22. Brands in the bottom half of web mentions were essentially invisible to AI. The engines cite Reddit threads, LinkedIn articles, YouTube transcripts, and roundup lists heavily, and you cannot manufacture those on your own domain.

What I did that probably did nothing

Honesty section. I ship llms.txt files on both sites. Google's John Mueller has said no AI system currently uses llms.txt, and an Ahrefs crawl found almost nobody's is even valid. I keep mine because it costs nothing and the downside is zero, but I will not pretend it earned a citation. Same with schema markup: Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD over seven months and found no meaningful citation lift on any platform. I keep schema for entity consistency, not because it moves AI answers. And nobody can sell you a "listing in ChatGPT." There is no submission pipeline. Anyone charging for one is charging for air.

Why a small site can win this

The old game compounded against small players: domain authority, link budgets, content volume. This game weights different things: direct answers, verifiable facts, consistent entities, and named mentions in places engines read. A small site that answers a specific question cleanly beats a big site that answers it vaguely, and the Princeton data showed citability tactics help lower-ranked sites most. That is the opening.

The other opening is geography. National head terms are contested. "Near me" and city-level questions are answered from thin, stale sources in most markets. If you are a local business, the AI answer for your category in your town is winnable in weeks, not years.

If you want this for your business

I productized this exact method for local and regional businesses: audit across the engines with screenshots, the fixes applied, and a recheck two weeks later. Details and pricing on the AI visibility service page. The first check is free, and if the engines already recommend you, I will tell you that and you owe nothing.