How to get your business quoted by ChatGPT and Perplexity
When someone asks an AI assistant who to hire, the answer comes from somewhere. Here is how to become the somewhere.
Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity to recommend a service business in your city and it will name names, with reasons. Those names are not random: assistants assemble answers from pages they can crawl, parse, and trust. Getting cited is a craft with knowable rules, and almost no local business is playing yet.
Rule one: be the same business everywhere
Engines cross-check. If your name, address, phone, and services differ between your site, your Google Business Profile, and the directories, the model's confidence in all of it drops, and low-confidence facts do not get repeated. The unglamorous first job of AI visibility is entity consistency: one canonical set of facts, everywhere, including the old copies you forgot about.
Rule two: write sentences a machine can lift
Assistants quote pages that answer questions in complete, standalone sentences. "Monolith is an AI-driven creative and marketing agency in Spokane, WA" survives being extracted; a hero that says "Bold ideas. Real results." does not, because it contains no facts. Audit your key pages for the sentence an assistant would need to quote, and if it does not exist, write it, ideally as the first line under the heading.
The technical layer, in priority order
- Schema: Organization, Service, FAQPage, and LocalBusiness markup give engines structured facts instead of prose to guess at.
- FAQ blocks: real questions with direct answers are the single most liftable format, for both AI answers and classic rich results.
- llms.txt: a plain-text summary of who you are, what you do, and what is canonically true, served at your domain root for AI crawlers.
- Crawler access: check that your robots rules actually let AI crawlers in. Plenty of sites block them by inherited default and never notice.
How to check whether it is working
Ask the assistants your customers' questions, monthly, in a fresh session: who should I hire for X in my city, what does Y cost locally. Track whether you are named, and what facts the answer gets wrong. Wrong facts point at exactly which source page is stale. This site practices what it is preaching, its own llms.txt is live at monolithdesign.agency/llms.txt, and the audit that produces all of the above is a standard SEO engagement here, $500-$750.
AI assistants cite businesses that are consistent, quotable, and structured. All three are groundwork you can lay this quarter, while your competitors are still optimizing for a results page that is quietly becoming the second question.
This is the thinking behind a service Monolith runs every week.
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