AEO
How do you get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini?
The honest starting point is that nobody outside these companies knows the rules, and the rules change without announcement. What follows is what is observable and what is worth doing regardless.
Be fetchable
Different assistants use different crawlers, and they are not interchangeable. Blocking a training crawler is not the same as blocking a search crawler, and a business that blocks broadly to protect its content sometimes removes itself from live answers by accident.
Check both your robots.txt and whatever bot protection your host applies. The second one is where this usually goes wrong silently.
Be quotable
An assistant is looking for a passage it can lift and stand behind. That favours writing where the answer is complete in one place.
Long, meandering pages get skipped not because they are bad, but because there is no clean passage to take. This is the single biggest writing change worth making.
Be corroborated
This is the part most people underrate. Assistants are cautious about repeating a claim that only one source makes.
So being listed in the obvious directories, being mentioned by local press, being named on the sites of businesses you actually work with, all feed the same signal: other sources agree that you exist and do what you say. For a local business this overlaps almost entirely with ordinary local search work.
Be consistent
If your own site describes you one way and your Google profile another, you have given a system with no way to resolve the contradiction a reason to skip you.
Pick one sentence that describes the business and use it everywhere without variation.
What not to bother with
Stuffing pages with phrases like as an AI assistant, or writing content addressed to the model rather than to a person, does not work and reads badly to humans.
Buying mentions on low-quality sites is the same mistake as buying links, arriving a decade later.
The uncomfortable summary
The work that gets you cited is mostly the work that has always been recommended: answer real questions properly, be credible, be consistent, be readable.
The novelty is in the target, not the method. Anyone offering a shortcut is describing something they cannot see either.
Common questions
How do you get cited by AI assistants?
Be readable by their crawlers, answer the question in a self-contained passage, be consistent about your own facts across the web, and be mentioned by other credible sources. Those four are observable in what gets cited. Anything more precise than that is guesswork.
Do AI assistants prefer certain types of website?
In practice they lean heavily on pages that answer a question directly and on sources that other sources corroborate. A page that says the same thing as three reputable pages is safer to quote than one that makes a novel claim.
Does being mentioned on other websites help?
It appears to matter a great deal. Assistants weigh whether anyone else says what you say about yourself, so directory listings, local press, and being named by other businesses all feed the same signal.
How long does it take to get cited?
There is no reliable answer, and it varies by assistant and by how competitive the question is. Some engines refresh their sources continuously, others work from periodic training data, so a new page can appear in one and be invisible in another for a long time.