How to Get Your Business Mentioned in AI Search: A 6-Step GEO & AEO Guide

There’s no single switch. AI mentions are earned over time as models build up a picture of who you are and what you’re known for. Five things move the needle, roughly in order of impact:

1. Become a recognisable entity, not just a website. AI models don’t read your page in isolation; they ask “what does this brand represent, what topics is it known for, how is it positioned against others?” Your job is to make that picture clear and consistent.
2. Prove real experience and expertise. Content with genuine first-hand experience and named, qualified authors behind it (hands-on case studies, original data, real results) gets cited over anonymous, generic copy. It’s the difference between a source worth repeating and filler.
3. Earn mentions on sources AI already trusts. News sites, industry publications, well-ranking listicles, Reddit threads, Wikipedia and Crunchbase. A 2025 Ahrefs study found branded web mentions had the strongest correlation with being cited in Google AI Overviews, and brands in the top quartile for mentions got up to 10× more AI citations than the next quartile down. In our work at Net Branding, this is consistently the lever that moves clients from invisible to cited.
4. Keep your facts identical everywhere. AI resolves conflicting information by trusting the version it sees most often. If your services, location or claims differ across your site, your Google Business Profile and directories, you create doubt, and doubt kills citations.
5. Make your site machine-readable. Schema markup, clean structure, fast indexing, an up-to-date Google Business Profile.

The rest of this guide breaks each of these down by the specific question people are asking.

The shape of it matters: GEO sits on top of SEO, not instead of it. A crawlable, well-ranked site is the foundation; the five levers are what turn that foundation into citations inside the AI answer itself.

Start with an audit, not content. It’s the first thing we do at Net Branding for any client: open ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini and type the questions your customers would actually ask, such as “best [your service] in Auckland”, “who should I use for X”. See who shows up. If it’s your competitors and not you, that gap is your roadmap.

Then build toward three pillars:

• Entity-rich content on your own site that states plainly who you are, what you do, where, and for whom.
• Third-party validation: mentions, commentary and citations on sources beyond your own domain.
• A clean technical foundation so AI can crawl, read and trust your pages.

The Net Branding AI Overview mention above is the first pillar in action: a clearly structured site that spells out exactly what the business does and where, so AI can read it and repeat it with confidence.

NZ angle: New Zealand adopts these trends later than the US and Australia, which means less competition for AI visibility right now. Getting GEO-optimised early genuinely means AI is more likely to name you instead of a rival. That window won’t stay open.

“AI search” spans several engines, and each cites differently, so a single-platform strategy leaves gaps. Here’s what each one rewards most:

The takeaway: test your visibility across all of them, because the gaps differ on each. At Net Branding, we track clients across every engine rather than optimising for one and hoping the rest follow.

Google AI Overviews now appear in roughly one in four search results, and of all the engines they lean hardest on traditional SEO. They correlate most strongly with organic rankings and brand signals, so classic SEO does the heavy lifting here, and GEO builds on top of it rather than replacing it. To improve your odds:

• Rank well organically for the query first; Overviews pull heavily from pages already ranking.
• Add structured data: FAQ, HowTo, Organisation and LocalBusiness schema.
• Keep your Google Business Profile complete, accurate and current.
• Use clear headers and concise paragraphs; Gemini, which powers Overviews, extracts at the paragraph level.

There’s also an authority threshold worth knowing about. AI models are risk-averse and lean toward high-authority domains. For smaller NZ businesses that can’t match the referring-domain count of global giants, the workaround is topical authority in a narrow niche: be the obvious, repeatedly cited answer for one specific local thing rather than competing broadly. That’s exactly the play that earned Net Branding its own AI Overview mention as an Auckland AI marketing specialist, rather than trying to out-rank the world on everything.

“AI builds on top of SEO; it doesn’t replace it. The technical foundations, the topical authority, the consistent signals you’ve spent years building all carry straight over into how AI sees you. But the gap between ranking #1 on Google and being named by ChatGPT has widened, so good SEO is now the price of entry, not the finish line. You still have to do the GEO work on top.”

Cathy Mellett, Net Branding.

ChatGPT rewards semantic authority: a consistent, broad reputation built up across many credible sources over time, plus presence in its training data.

• Get referenced on high-authority sites: news, established industry blogs, Wikipedia, Crunchbase (update entries factually, never as self-promotion).
• Keep your brand language and positioning identical everywhere so ChatGPT can confidently categorise what you do.
• Write declarative, citation-worthy statements a model can lift verbatim.
• Track your “Share of Model”: how often AI names you versus competitors for a set of prompts. It’s the GEO replacement for Share of Voice.

Reddit is one of the most heavily-cited sources in AI answers, because models treat genuine peer discussion as high-trust signal. But it punishes obvious marketing:

• Be honest, not salesy. When a relevant recommendation thread comes up, offer your product as one option among several, saying what it’s good at and where it isn’t the best fit. AI weighs nuanced, authentic mentions far more heavily than self-promotion.
• Find the threads AI is already citing. Run your core queries in ChatGPT and Perplexity and see which Reddit threads surface. If you’re absent from those threads, that’s exactly where to participate.
• Contribute real expertise in relevant subreddits over time, and never astroturf, which both Reddit and AI models increasingly detect and discount.

Search is no longer just about being found; it’s about being understood, trusted and referenced. AI brand mentions shape how models describe your business, whether they trust your expertise, and whether they recommend you at all.

The brands that win are the ones that act now: clear positioning, demonstrable experience and expertise, structured and factual content, consistent facts everywhere, and a deliberate digital-PR effort to earn quality third-party mentions. In a market that adopts slowly, early movers get named by AI before their competitors even realise the race has started.

At Net Branding, this is the work we do for Auckland and NZ businesses every day, and we’re already in the AI results we’re helping clients reach. If you want to find out where your business currently shows up across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews, that audit is the place to start.

This section also serves as the script for the accompanying video.

Google rankings are no longer the whole game. AI is deciding who gets seen next.

Right now, millions of people are skipping traditional search results and asking ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI-powered search tools for answers instead.

And here’s the uncomfortable reality for many businesses: if AI isn’t mentioning you, recommending you or citing your content, you’re becoming invisible in a growing share of online discovery.

That’s why one of the fastest-growing questions we’re being asked is: how do you get mentioned in AI?

Whether you’re talking about AI Search, AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, or whatever comes next, visibility is no longer just about ranking on Google. It’s about being referenced, cited and recommended by AI.

So how do you increase your chances?

1. Become a credible source. AI platforms are designed to identify trustworthy information. The more expertise, authority and value you demonstrate, the more likely you are to be recognised as a reliable source.
2. Create content that answers questions. AI exists to provide answers. Businesses that consistently answer real customer questions clearly and comprehensively are giving AI more reasons to reference them.
3. Build authority around a topic. Publishing random content won’t cut it. The businesses gaining traction in AI search are those that consistently demonstrate expertise in a specific area over time.
4. Earn mentions beyond your own website. AI doesn’t just evaluate your website. It looks at reviews, articles, media mentions, business listings, social signals, partnerships and third-party references to help establish credibility.
5. Make it easy for AI to understand you. Clear website structure, well-organised content, FAQs, schema, and strong technical foundations all help AI systems interpret and surface your information more effectively.
6. Choose both your tools and your people wisely. There are plenty of tools promising instant AI visibility. Some are useful. Many are oversold. The reality is that AI visibility isn’t created by automation alone. It comes from combining the right technology with the right strategy, experience and expertise.

Everyone is talking about AI. We’re busy implementing it.

Today, visibility isn’t just about ranking on Google. It’s about appearing in AI Overviews. Being recommended by AI assistants. Being the answer, not just another option.

That’s where GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and AI-ready content strategies come into play.

But technology alone doesn’t create growth. People do. Trust. Familiarity. Credibility. Perceived value.

To be seen. To be found. To be cited. To be trusted. To be the business people and AI platforms turn to when it matters most.

Because when people repeatedly see a business being referenced, recommended and recognised, something powerful happens. Confidence grows. The unfamiliar becomes familiar. The familiar becomes trusted.

And when a decision needs to be made, trust often wins before price, features or convenience ever enter the conversation.

The businesses that capture attention tomorrow are building that trust today.

Since 2009, Net Branding has helped businesses navigate every major digital shift. If you’re looking for practical guidance on how to improve your visibility across search engines and AI platforms, identify the opportunities you’re missing, and build a strategy that delivers long-term results, let’s talk.

Cathy Mellett, author of Be Found. Be Cited. Be Trusted., and the Net Branding team can help you cut through the hype, focus on what works, and position your business to be found, trusted and recommended in the evolving AI landscape.

📞 Call Cathy Mellett

Cathy Mellett is the founder and CEO of Net Branding, an Auckland digital marketing agency she established in 2009. With more than 25 years in business, IT and digital marketing, she has worked with over 250 businesses across New Zealand and overseas.

She is the author of Be Found. Be Cited. Be Trusted., a short, practical book on staying visible as search shifts to AI. It distils six months of research, drawing on data from Seer Interactive, Ahrefs, Stacker, SparkToro and Google, into ten chapters across forty pages.

Read Be Found. Be Cited. Be Trusted. on Kindle