How We Get Businesses Named in AI Answers

On September 9, 2026, we asked ChatGPT what a guest had said on Build or Break, a weekly interview show we work with. It cited the episode page we built by the title we wrote for one of its chapters, “Every startup's valley of death and Steve Jobs' signal-vs-noise rule”, and named the chapter and its timestamp. That title exists in one place on the internet.

That's the work we sell. We get a business found on Google and named when its customers ask an assistant who to call.

Why an answer names so few businesses

Search Google and you get ten links, with more below. Ask an assistant and you get one reply, written from a handful of pages, naming the businesses it can back with a source. That's usually two or three, because a reply that lists twelve has stopped answering the question.

That makes an answer much harder to get into than a results page. Fifth place on Google still gets seen. A business that would have come fifth in an answer is usually left out of it, and nothing in its analytics records the customer who never arrived.

The pages an assistant reads tend to be pages that already rank, which is why we run SEO and GEO as one job. Ranking gets a page read. What's written on it decides whether it gets quoted.

What makes a page worth citing

Five things make a business easy to name, and we work on all of them.

First, a page for every thing worth finding, because an assistant can only cite a page that exists. When we started on Court Vision's site, nothing on it answered a search for group or youth basketball training, so we wrote two new pages, one for each.

Then structured data, the markup that tells a machine what a page is so it doesn't have to guess from the layout. On all 18 of Danly Properties' property pages it names the owner and the leasing phone, and on 15 of them the street address.

The business has to be described the same way everywhere. An assistant has to work out that the company on a website and the one on a map listing are the same company, and every place the name or address is written differently makes that harder. Bassetti Consulting shares its name with an unrelated French company, so every page of its site carries structured data naming the firm and the CPA who leads it.

Each page should answer one question, in sentences that still make sense when an assistant lifts one out. A sentence that depends on the paragraph before it stops making sense when it's quoted alone. The chapter title ChatGPT cited works because it names the idea being discussed, and every chapter title on Build or Break's episode pages is written that way.

Last, the site has to let AI crawlers in. We write a plain-text summary at /llms.txt for the crawlers that look for one, and a robots.txt that names the AI crawlers the site allows. It's a one-line decision, and a lot of sites have never made it on purpose.

How we measure it

Nobody controls what an assistant says, and we don't promise anyone a place in one. We make a business easy to name, then count how often it gets named.

The count follows a fixed protocol. We take three questions a customer would ask and run each one three times in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI mode. The report says how many of the nine runs in each engine named the business, with the date and the sites each answer cited. An answer has no positions, so there's no rank to report.

Answers change from run to run, which is why the protocol repeats every question. The examples in this post are single runs, so we call them checks, and each carries its date. They show what an answer said on that day.

What the answers said on recent projects

The episode pages we built for Build or Break carry full transcripts. On October 1, 2026, we asked Perplexity “On the Build or Break podcast, what did Kevin O'Leary say about the valley of death?” It cited the Kevin O'Leary page for every paragraph of its answer and quoted the transcript word for word: “You're going to go down into the valley of death”. The same day, Google's AI mode answered that question from the episode and cited nothing but pages we worked on: the episode page and the show's hub. Site-wide, citations inside AI answers rose 118% after launch, according to Google Search Console figures published September 17, 2026.

Danly Properties is an Austin commercial landlord. It had 18 properties behind a single web address, and the one page search engines could read said “Property Not Found”. We rebuilt the site with a page for each property.

Asked “who owns the shopping center at 7301 Burnet Rd in Austin” on October 1, 2026, Google's AI mode credited Danly with the center and cited the page we built for it. The same day, we asked Perplexity which locally owned landlords own retail shopping centers in Austin. It listed Danly first and cited danlyproperties.com. In Google Search Console figures published September 17, 2026, 17 of the site's 22 ranking pages sit on page one of Google.

Court Vision is a basketball training business in Cedar Park, Texas. For “basketball training cedar park” on October 1, 2026, Google's AI Overview named Court Vision and linked the group training page we built. Its description, “structured, coach-led group basketball training sessions”, follows the wording on that page. Clicks from Google rose 24%, from 132 to 164, comparing matched 60-day windows in Google Search Console data through September 27, 2026.

Bassetti Consulting is an Austin firm providing fractional controller services, and when it came to us it had no website. We designed and built a nine-page site, with structured data on every page and 22 FAQ answers in markup. On October 1, 2026, we asked three AI engines about the firm: Perplexity and both of Google's AI answers. Each one described it correctly and cited its site, and Perplexity told it apart from the French company with the same name. In a Google search the same day, the firm came first for its own name, with four of the top six results.

Recent projects has every result above with its date and source, and the work behind each one. If you want to know whether ChatGPT names your business today, tell us what you sell and where and we'll check.