How can we get our company mentioned/cited more often in the AI Search Results (A guide for 2026)

 

Author: Ryan Walsh
Date: 02/12/2025
Read time: 11 Minutes

How customers are finding products and services online has fundamentally changed.
Sure, customers are still using the traditional methods, and these are still the main method of purchasing good and services.

However, in a relatively short period of time, AI has been creeping more and more into our everyday lives.
Take for example Google AI Overviews, Chat GPT direct answers, as well as Perplexity.

 

Synthesized answers

This is one of the main reasons why we think here at Walsh & Partners that AI is going to keep on growing as customers get more and more acquainted with the AI systems.

For example, when buying a product or finding a local business through traditional search, well there’s a little of work that the customer must do. For example, a must wade through and start clicking on the different organic search engine results.

Perhaps, they click on four different businesses, before get to the result they want.

However, AI models such as Chat GPT well that turns everything on its head, it presents synthesized answers. Its basically like asking a real-life sale assistant or expert questions on a product, getting more bespoke and well-rounded answer.

What exactly is AI Search Optimisation?

This sounds super complicated, doesn’t it? But like everything, there’s an easy way to explain and do everything- let us do just that.
Quite simply put, whether its ChatGPT or Perplexity, or perhaps an type of AI system that you are optimising for. Basically, all of these systems have been trained on training data, such as the text you are reading right here, right now.
And there “LLM optimisation” or “Generative Engine Optimisation” (GEO) is just simply getting business cited, mentioned more often on these platforms. That’s so a shopper for candles made from organic compounds, can say click the citation, then go straight across the shopper’s website.
There SEO agencies globally now need to wear multiple caps, perhaps there optimising for a mixture of Google Business results, the organic results, perhaps also LLMs as well.

What platforms are SEO companies often optimising for?

Google AI Overviews

For a long time the Google results could be split up into the Google AdWords results, the organic results, and perhaps if we taking about a customer wanting to find a local business, then often they will have the Google Business results as well.

However, now there’s a new result, that’s the Google AI Overview results, which appears high up on the page. The AI generated summaries, appear “top of the fold” and appear directly above Google’s organic search results.

 

What about ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is simply amazing, and therefore many businesses are rushing like the gold rush, to make sure that there businesses services, products and of course content marketing such as blog posts get cited as a ChatGPT response. The name of the game here is to get your business mentioned as a citation, so that you can attract more links.
Then there’s also Microsoft’s Copilot and also Perplexity, however, there is many other AI and LLM’s on the market that shoppers use.

Tell me how traditional SEO, such as optimising for Google’s organic SERP’s is different for LLMS?

So, let’s take a step back, and think of it from a shoppers point of view.

 

Google

In terms of shopping on Google often shoppers were typing a question, or they were using voice search.

Then businesses would appear in what’s called the search engine results pages. These are often commonly referred to as the SERP’s.

The SERP’s, would rank websites based on how relevant the website was, also the authority and of course how strong various ranking factors were.

SEO agencies therefore obsess about building links, writing quality content marketing, and also improving the on-page SEO elements. And this still in 2025 and about to enter 2026 still very important.

However, there’s also AI Overviews at the top of the results, so therefore Google has now introduced AI in to its own results.

Now how this differs from say using ChatGPT is that ChatGPT actually provides a comprehensive answer, and the answer comes after often quite a few supplementary questions being asked by the shopper.

Therefore, this has many marketing companies, thinking well how do you best optimise for say ChatGPT.

The answers very simple, therefore what we recommend is writing the best, the strongest and the clearest answer you can when creating content marketing.

The work needs to be the best to stand out not just in Google’s organic results, but also in ChatGPT as well.
Therefore, this is where the competition really intensives, and gets a lot more difficult when you think of optimising for the LLM’s because, well there’s less opportunity for businesses to be cited, as sometimes only business may well be cited as a citation link.

However, the emphasis is still very much on writing quality content marketing, this will stand your business in good stead, whether your optimising for organic search results, or perhaps your optimising for the LLM’s- therefore your content marketing needs to be very high quality.

For example, regardless of whether your optimising for LLM’s or perhaps for organic SEO, the content marketing should offer the following:

• High Google EEAT score
• It should have a very high word count
• It needs to be updated
• The work should be detailed; written in way it offers a lot of helpful advice.

Why businesses cant afford to ignore AI

Here at Walsh & Partners we have been at the forefront of helping businesses to optimise for AI platforms. We now state to customers that the businesses content marketing needs to be quality for two main reasons, because of Google EEAT for organic SEO, yet also you want your answer to be cited to AI platforms as well.

AI Overviews for example now appear in 13% of searches on Google- therefore considering that these answer are right at the top of the page, they likely to hoover up a huge amount of the clicks.

Therefore businesses need to ascertain, well, how can they appear in Google’s AI Overviews as well.

 

Conversion rates

Heres the main that businesses really need to understand, is that there are now reliable statistics starting to emerge, that actually state that if a customer was to find yoru business on an AI platform, such as ChatGPT they are more likely to convert.
In matter of fact, its been stated that AI search visitors, actually convert up 4.4 times better than if the shopper was to find you via the organic search results.

The reason for this is pretty simple, AI is acting like a sales assistant, its answering questions, its offering detailed advice.
For example, a shopper might start at the top of the sales funnel, for example not knowing what product they want to buy. They may just have an idea of what they want to spend on say a new e-bike, yet by asking say a lot of question on ChatGPT they become more and more informed about which product is best for them.

For example, they go from saying that they have a budget of £2000.00 to spend on product, yet by the end, after asking questions such, which products have won Which best buy award, they may at the end have a really good understanding of the products or services they need by having a conversation with say ChatGPT.

This why many marketing experts believe that when customers find you via AI platforms such as ChatGPT the conversion rates can actually be much better.

How do you optimise for these AI systems?

Well, the first step to verify whether the AI platforms, such as ChatGPT can crawl and index your businesses content marketing.

For example, just as you need Googlebot, to crawl and index your content marketing, such as your homepage for it to appear in the organic search engine results, you need the same to happen for AI platforms, such as ChatGPT.
For example, the work needs to be read, or “crawled” by an automated bot.

 

Robots.txt file

Therefore ask your SEO team to check your businesses robots.txt file, on your website, such as when going on walshandpartners.co.uk/robots.txt to see if the bots can crawl the content marketing or not.
ChatGPT for example uses a bot called “GPTbot” so therefore you need to make sure the website can get crawled by this bot.
If your web developers for example create a CMS that blocks these crawlers, then what you are doing is blocking AI access.

 

Make your content marketing as helpful as possible

We fully appreciate that, businesses who are implementing SEO themselves, well they often haven’t got much time to be writing long articles, which are sometimes in excess of 2,000 words.

However, what you need to do is to make your marketing as high quality as possibly can. What this does is improves your businesses chances of being mentioned with the large language models, as well as also ranking higher within Google’s or say Bing’s organic search results.

Here’s what you need to do to make your content marketing good quality.

 

Helpful

The content marketing needs to be helpful, therefore, think about how you add much helpful information as possible. For example, this normally means writing a longer article, so that it offers much more helpful advice. It should therefore give the shopper a detailed answer, where any further questions they are likely to have are also answered. Therefore, consider writing your content marketing in a conversational way, with FAQ and make it better than your direct competitors.

 

Written by an expert

We previously mentioned Google EEAT and how a core part of this is “expertise”. Therefore, when Googlebot crawls and indexes a piece of work, such as a new blog post, well it instantly is able to understand if that work is written by an expert on that subject.

A lot of the top marketing agencies in the world, believe that’s because of the semantic web, Google can instantly tell if an article is well written and has a high Google EEAT score or not. This means that if the article is detailed, well written, it will have written throughout the article a lot of mentions of different entities.

If you don’t know what an entity is, it can be a place, a person an event in time. When you write a long form piece of content marketing, such as what are reading here, you will mention different entities, such as Google, or Perplexity or lets say ChatGPT (all brand names and therefore entities) and therefore Google (Google’s Knowledge Graph) is able to better understand that your writing about AI.
Citations

In order to make your content marketing that bit better quality, its important to mention citations. Now these citations are different from what AI platforms use to cite your business, instead, they are used to offer an outbound link to mention perhaps for example a statistic that you cited within your content marketing. However, by mentioning citations in your own work, your proving that the work is high quality that you have conducted a lot of research.

 

Original

Make sure the work is orginal don’t copy a competitors as this will mean that the work is duplicated, and therefore in terms of SEO will be deemed as low quality.

 

Don’t use the LLM’s

Here’s the irony in the situation, don’t use LLM’s to write the text, to improve your visablity in the LLMS this doesn’t work. Instead, the work needs to be high quality written by a human.