Ask ChatGPT to recommend a supplier in your industry and you'll get a shortlist of names back. Those names didn't land there by luck. Here's what puts a business on the list, and how you become one of them.
How an AI decides who to name
When you ask an assistant for a recommendation, it isn't reading live reviews and ranking them on the spot. It's drawing on patterns it has learned about who's credible in your field, from the content it trained on and the sources it can pull in. The businesses it names are the ones it has the clearest, most consistent and most trusted picture of.
So the job is to give it that picture. Five things do most of the work.
Get your details consistent everywhere
AI models learn from patterns, and mixed signals confuse them. When your business name, services, location and contact details line up across your website, Google profile, directories, reviews and any press, the model builds a confident picture of who you are and what you do.
When those details contradict each other, an old address here, a different trading name there, a service you dropped two years ago still listed somewhere, you get harder to trust and easier to skip. Tidying up your information across the web is dull work, and it's one of the most useful things you can do for how AI sees you.
Answer the questions people ask
AI assistants exist to answer questions, so they favour content built the same way. Pages that pose a clear question and answer it properly, "How much does X cost?", "What's the best option for a small team?", "How long does Y take?", are far easier for an assistant to lift and quote than a wall of marketing copy.
Write the questions your customers ask, the ones they'd type into a search bar or say out loud, then answer them in plain language. A good FAQ section does a lot of this work, and it earns you traffic and citations at the same time.
Earn trust from sources the AI already trusts
Reviews, mentions and links from places an assistant already treats as reliable work as votes of confidence. A strong, recent review profile pulls double duty: it reassures the people reading it, and it signals to the machines reading it that you're a business worth recommending.
Recency matters here. A burst of reviews three years ago carries less weight than a steady trickle of recent ones. Mentions work the same way: a write-up in a respected local or industry publication tells an AI more than a dozen low-quality directory listings.
Make your content easy for machines to read
A person can skim a messy page and still get the gist. A machine needs more help. Schema markup, FAQ sections, clean headings and short summaries let an engine pull your information accurately instead of guessing.
This is quiet, technical work that never shows up on the page, and it's often the difference between an AI quoting you correctly and skipping you because it couldn't make sense of what you offer.
Show there's real expertise behind it
Thin, generic content gets ignored. Specific, experience-backed insight, the kind only someone who does the work could write, is what marks you out as a source worth citing.
That means showing who's behind the business, what you've done, and the detail a real practitioner would know. Named authors, case studies with real numbers, a clear point of view a generic article wouldn't risk. The more your content reads as the work of people who know the subject, the more an AI trusts it.
This is ongoing work
None of this happens by accident, and none of it is a single job you tick off. Consistency, fresh reviews and credible content build up over time, and it's work most of your competitors haven't started.
We build AEO into every campaign, so your brand keeps showing up as search shifts.
Written by
Momentum Team