When ChatGPT or Claude names a tool, people trust it the way they trust a friend, and that recommendation converts unusually well. In the video below, Tanya from rankingonai.com walks through the exact playbook she uses to get SaaS like Suno and Cal.com cited by AI, and the steps work just as well for a one-person business. Here is that process, broken down so you can start today even with no budget.
One idea sits underneath everything that follows: AI repeats the consensus the internet has already reached about you. Your job is to build that consensus and point it at your brand. Google now states plainly that SEO and AI features run on the same signals, and the overlap between ChatGPT citations and Google's first page is roughly 63%, according to Tanya in the video. Do the work once and you show up in both.
Step 1: See where you stand with AI today
You can't fix what you haven't measured. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini and ask each one the questions a buyer would ask before choosing someone like you: "best [your category] tools," "alternatives to [a competitor]," "who should I use for X." Note whether you appear, who gets named instead, and which sources the model cites. Those cited pages are your real competition.
Doing that by hand across several engines and dozens of prompts gets tedious fast, which is why we built an AI visibility checker into Distribb. It shows you where your brand currently shows up (or doesn't) across the AI engines, so you have a clear baseline before you spend a single hour writing. You can run it free during the 3-day Distribb trial, then re-run it each month to watch your visibility climb.
Check your AI visibility free. See exactly where ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini do (and don't) recommend you, then let Distribb write and publish the content that fixes the gaps. Try the AI visibility checker at distribb.io with a 3-day free trial, no commitment.
Step 2: Give yourself a crawlable place to publish
When someone asks an AI about your company, the model checks your own site first, so owning that narrative matters. If you have no content setup at all, add a CMS. Ghost is the cheapest solid option and starts free; WordPress or Payload work well on more mature sites.
One catch most engineers miss: the page has to be crawlable. Fully "vibe-coded" sites with heavy dynamic rendering crawl badly, and the AI engines struggle to read them. A proper CMS handles this for you. Check what a bot actually sees with a crawlability tool before you invest in writing, because a page the crawler renders blank will never be cited no matter how good the copy is.
Step 3: Target bottom-of-funnel keywords buyers actually search
Here is where most founders go wrong. They chase informational queries like "what is an AI proofreader." Those are dead for AI visibility, because the model just answers the question inside the chat and nobody clicks. The money is in bottom-of-funnel content: the searches people make when they already want to buy.
That means comparisons, listicles, and buying guides. "Best SEO tools," "Ahrefs vs Semrush," "[competitor] alternative," "X buying guide." To find yours fast, copy your entire landing page, paste it into Claude or ChatGPT, and ask for the bottom-of-funnel keywords people might search, listicles and comparison content included. Then ask it to narrow the list to the five or ten most relevant. Skip the search-volume obsession for now; getting the first pieces live matters more than perfect data.
Step 4: Write content that AI wants to quote
Take that keyword list back to your AI and ask it to turn each one into an AI-visibility prompt plus a content brief. Now you know exactly what to write and which question each piece answers. A blend of human writing and AI drafting usually wins: the human supplies real stance and specifics, the AI handles speed.
Write self-contained, quotable claims, because a sentence like "our one-time tool converted at 17% on bottom-of-funnel searches" is exactly what a model lifts into an answer, while "there are many factors to consider" gets skipped. If you are producing this at volume, dedicated AI content writing software keeps the pipeline full without the quality collapsing into thin filler that neither Google nor the LLMs will cite.
Step 5: Get indexed and stack your trust signals
Publishing isn't enough; the page has to be found and believed. Connect Google Search Console and confirm your blog is fully indexed. Then layer on the basics that signal trust: a clean meta title and description, real images, schema markup, an FAQ block with FAQ schema, and a visible author name, bio, and photo. Google and the LLMs lean heavily on these experience and authority cues, the framework Google calls E-E-A-T.
Authority arguments do the heavy lifting with ChatGPT in particular. Name the recognizable brands you've worked with, drop real numbers, and yes, brag a little. Put logos in as text, not only as images, because images get skipped. This on-page foundation is the same groundwork covered in our guide to SEO positioning strategies, and it is what separates a page that gets cited from one that gets ignored.
Step 6: Build topical authority with internal linking
One strong article rarely wins on its own. Google and the LLMs reward topical authority, which is simply how much they believe your site knows about a subject. Publish 500 articles about tennis and the model treats you as the tennis expert; write one stray post about green tea and it won't suddenly rank you for green tea. Depth in one lane beats scattering shallow posts across ten.
You build that depth with topical clusters and internal linking: group related articles together and link them so the AI can see the relationships and the most important pages get reinforced. A fast way to do this is to paste your whole blog into Claude and ask it to map your topical clusters and suggest internal links, returning the source page, target page, anchor text, and where each link goes. Running the right AI SEO tools can automate the linking and clustering so the structure builds itself as you publish.
Step 7: Earn mentions on sites AI already trusts
Your own site sets your narrative, but the AI trusts third parties more. This is digital PR, and it is less complicated than it sounds. Ask ChatGPT for the best tools in your category, name a competitor, then scroll to its sources and click through. You'll find the 10 to 20 listicles the model pulls from, most of them written by competitors. Export those URLs into a sheet, then email each site owner: "I saw your listicle, would you add my tool?"
Some won't reply, some will ask for payment (paying for placement is more common than founders expect, often around $150), and some will swap. The swap is the cheapest path: if your own listicle ranks well, offer to feature them in exchange for being featured back. That mutual link building is exactly what an AI backlink exchange systematizes, earning you contextual links from real businesses in your space instead of cold-emailing one site at a time. Affiliates and niche bloggers are a second channel: give them free premium access and a few cross-promotion touchpoints, and a higher commission than your competitors offer often earns top placement on their lists outright.
Step 8: Stack the fast-moving channels
Some channels pay off in days, not months. Posting a listicle on Medium and LinkedIn can get you quoted in Google's AI Overview within 72 hours in a non-competitive niche. On LinkedIn, create an article rather than a post so you get a custom title, description, and room for images. Add product screenshots and GIFs everywhere, since people skim and the visuals get picked up.
The biggest current lever is YouTube. Take your keyword list, make a short video for the top terms, and design a thumbnail with your logo and company name on it, because Google and the AI engines are surfacing video thumbnails directly in results and most competitors haven't made any. A practical walkthrough lives in our guide on how to embed YouTube videos in blog articles for SEO. Round it out with the sources AI cites most: G2 and Capterra for reviews, Reddit for long-tail and niche questions, and Wikipedia once you're established enough to qualify.
Step 9: Track what converts and double down
You can't improve what you can't see, and AI traffic is notoriously hard to measure. The average AI clickthrough rate is around 1%, so you may be recommended constantly and barely see it in analytics. Connect Google Analytics, check your acquisition reports by source and medium (chatgpt.com, claude, and the rest show up there), and mentally multiply those numbers by roughly 100 to estimate real exposure.
Then get specific about money. Track which article drives signups and which drives paying customers, not just clicks, because a post can pull 50,000 visits and convert nobody. Once you spot the article and the niche that actually produce revenue, double down there. This is the loop that compounds, and it is exactly the grind Distribb runs on autopilot so it keeps going instead of stalling after week two.
Which AI should you optimize for?
The work to show up is nearly identical across the engines, so start publishing and worry about niching down later. That said, here is where to weight your effort based on who you sell to.
| Engine | Why it matters | Best for |
| Google AI Overview | Still drives the most trackable clicks; non-negotiable | Every business |
| ChatGPT | Roughly 70% of all LLM-driven traffic | General and B2C audiences |
| Claude | Preferred by technical and professional users | Developers, PMs, technical buyers |
| Grok | Smaller volume, tied to the X audience | Twitter/X-native niches |
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to get AI to recommend my business?
It varies. Quick wins like a Medium or LinkedIn listicle can earn an AI Overview citation in 72 hours in a low-competition niche, and listicles have shown up as top ChatGPT sources within 12 hours. The durable, compounding results from your own blog usually take weeks to a few months as pages get indexed and trusted.
Does my domain rating matter for AI visibility?
Far less than for traditional SEO. Tanya notes that pages with a domain rating as low as three or five get picked up by ChatGPT when the content fits the query well. A brand-new blog can rank in AI answers, which is exactly why publishing early is worth it even before you've built authority.
Should I focus on my own website or third-party sites?
Both, in that order. Your own CMS lets you control the narrative the AI reads first, so set that up immediately. Then pursue third-party mentions, listicles, reviews, and community posts, because the models weight independent sources more heavily than your own marketing.
What kind of content gets cited by AI?
Bottom-of-funnel content: comparisons, "best of" listicles, alternatives pages, and buying guides, written with clear, self-contained claims the model can quote directly. Informational explainers are largely answered inside the chat with no click, so they do little for visibility.
Are there shortcuts or tactics to avoid?
Be careful with gray-hat plays like buying a "[yourbrand]review.com" exact-match domain stuffed with your own glowing reviews. It can work briefly for AI visibility, but Google actively bans sites like that, so you risk burning the domain. Skip anything that depends on tricking the engines, since the durable wins all come from genuinely helpful, trustworthy content.
Do I have to pay to be recommended by ChatGPT or Perplexity?
No. Organic recommendations are earned through your overall footprint, not bought. You may choose to pay for backlink placements or affiliate commissions to build that footprint faster, but the recommendation itself isn't a paid slot.
The takeaway
Getting AI to recommend your business is a sequence, not a secret: measure where you stand, own a crawlable blog, target bottom-of-funnel keywords, publish trustworthy content, build topical authority, earn third-party mentions, stack the fast channels, and track what converts. Start this week. Check your current AI visibility, pull ten bottom-of-funnel keywords from your landing page, and ship the first piece. If you'd rather have that whole loop run for you, try Distribb free for 3 days and let it write, publish, and build the backlinks while you build the product.