How to get ChatGPT to mention your solution in responses to buyer queries
The sales funnel starts when the buyer’s funnel ends.
Your sales funnel begins where your buyer’s funnel ends.
By the time buyers contact sales, they already know exactly what they want.
Here’s how the buying journey has changed:
Buyer’s journey in 2015:
1. Gets a personalized, thoughtful cold email.
2. Replies and schedules a meeting.
3. Talks to a BDR who asks 10 qualifying questions and schedules another call.
4. Meets with an AE who repeats those same questions.
5. Sees a demo only on the third call.
6. Does Google searches to evaluate competitors.
7. Makes a decision and purchases.
Buyer’s journey in 2025:
1. AI screens all their incoming calls and emails.
2. Every seller sends hyper-personalized emails powered by AI.
3. Buyer never responds to cold outreach.
4. Buyer discovers interesting content from a tech founder on LinkedIn.
5. Clicks through to the founder’s LinkedIn profile.
6. Then visits their LinkedIn company page.
7. Clicks the website link from the company page.
8. Spends less than 10 seconds on the website.
9. Seller sends automated follow-up emails based on the website visit.
10. Buyer unsubscribes from the automated emails
11. Buyer asks ChatGPT for help evaluating options.
12. ChatGPT answers based on readily available, clearly structured, and consistent online information.
13. Buyer validates options by messaging peers via Slack, LinkedIn, and text.
14. Buyer contacts their preferred seller ready to buy, with their decision already made.
What's changed?
Buyers want clear, structured information online that helps them confidently decide before ever talking to sales. Your content must be easy for AI to find, interpret, and reference.
David Kirkdorffer wrote a great piece on exactly how to structure your content so AI tools like ChatGPT can effectively reference your solution. (Linked here)
I've copied here David Kirkdorffer's 7-Step process for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO / AIO / AIEO) to ensure AIs like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini recognizes and recommends your brand.
How do we ensure that AI recognizes and includes our brand in its responses? It starts with making our brand and product information easy for AI to find, understand, and synthesize. Let’s focus on this question more deeply.
1. Make Your Website AI-Friendly
AI models don’t crawl websites like traditional search engines. Instead of indexing everything, they focus on structured data, clear formatting, and widely referenced content to synthesize accurate responses. If your website isn’t easy for AI to process, your brand is less likely to be surfaced.
Here are four key ideas to consider:
Ensure your “About Us” page clearly states who you are, what you do, and who you serve. Make that the top of the page. Your company origin story, executives and other stuff can come after.
Create a “Compare Us” page that explicitly names competitors and explains the differences (AI thrives on explicit comparisons).
Maintain a Press & Media page that curates third-party mentions as these reinforce credibility.
Follow Website Accessibility best practices. They improve SEO. They also improve GEO.
All of these ideas aren’t just for AI. They make life easier for actual people visiting your website looking to understand your solutions, too. And they help AI recognize, understand, and recall your brand.
2. Ensure AI Understands and Recognizes Your Brand Messaging
Use your exact brand and product names consistently. Some companies have nick-names, or different ways to present acronyms. That can become confusing. Standardizing your naming across all platforms helps reinforce AI (and human) recognition. Going back to authoritative websites in your industry and asking they be updated helps your consistency.
The same applies to your company and solution descriptions. If a prospect finds five different versions of how your product is described across directories and industry sites, it confuses them and creates doubt. AI models process this inconsistency the same way buyers do, by questioning which version is accurate. Consistency helps credibility.
Pair creative messaging with structured, clear descriptions that reinforce your positioning. Instead of just saying "Revolutionizing enterprise security," add a follow-up like "AI-powered cybersecurity that detects and stops threats in real time." This makes it easier for AI to correctly interpret and categorize your brand.
3. Get Third-Party Mentions and Check for Consistency
AI models favor information that appears across multiple sources. Our marketing is already aiming for mentions in industry publications, analyst reports, trade blogs, customer reviews, podcasts and interviews.
Now, we need to request journalists and partners to use our full company name, and consistent descriptions, not just shorthand. Again, the mantra is consistency helps credibility.
4. Strengthen Your Listings and Reviews
AI pulls information from directories like G2, Capterra, and Crunchbase, and other relevant directories. If profiles on these sites are incomplete or inconsistent, AI may deprioritize your brand in responses.
Updating and maintaining directory listings takes effort, but ensuring they are properly categorized with clear product descriptions and benefits improves visibility. Aligning messaging across platforms helps eliminate outdated descriptions that will confuse AIs and people.
Also, check where competitors show up in AI-generated results. If they appear and you don’t, you have an opportunity to add another mention. And of course encourage reviewers to include your full brand name and product details.
5. Format Content So AI Can Process and Use It
I’ve mentioned that AI prefers structured content. Here are some examples:
FAQs (AI loves Q&A formats)
Comparison tables
Bullet points
Clear headers
Well-labeled sections
The table below highlights how optimizing content for AI (GEO) differs from traditional Google SEO and some steps to improve AI visibility in your content.
If you use tables to present structured information, it’s a good idea to follow best practices for website accessibility.
AI understands well-formatted tables, especially for comparisons and feature lists. However, tables should follow proper HTML markup (e.g., <th> for headers, <caption> for summaries) so that both AI and accessibility tools interpret them correctly. The same markup that enables web accessibility machine readers to correctly read a table for blind people makes a table more clearly understandable for AIs, too. Poor structured tables and missing markup can confuse AI, causing it to misread relationships between data points.
You want to use clear, informative headings as AI relies on headings to understand content structure, just like humans do. Descriptive, well-organized headings help AI models recognize key topics and retrieve relevant details when generating answers.
Avoid vague headings like “Overview” or “Details”. Instead, use ones that clearly reflect the topic, like “How AI Prioritizes Information” or “AI-Optimized Content Strategies.”
A great source to learn more about Tables accessibility and ideas to be aware of is the W3 website: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/tables/
6. Make Valuable Content Public
A common mistake B2B brands make is keeping their most insightful, research-backed content locked behind registration forms (“gates”).
But AIs can’t reference what it can’t read. PDFs, webinars, podcasts, and gated assets are invisible to AI tools. And, honestly, it’s often hard for your prospects to access, too.
Additionally, a lot of great content and internal-only sales documents that would help buyers is “gated” behind actively speaking with Sales reps.
For years I’ve written about “Buyer Enablement”, which aims to get this “Sales Enablement” content onto websites, so it’s easily found and freely accessible to prospects, so buyers feel confident selecting a solution, even before they reveal themselves to vendors.
Now, I can think of this same valuable information as “AI Enablement.” That is, information that helps AI recognize and cite our brand when prospects are researching. Indeed, recognizing we need to “Enable” AIs that are answering prospects’ questions is how I became interested in this topic in the first place!
This doesn’t mean giving away everything, but it does mean making case studies, expert insights, solution comparisons, and all sorts of detailed information publicly available, for prospects, and now also in AI readable formats.
7. How to Check If AI Mentions Your Brand
AI tools don’t have a dashboard like Google Search Console to tell you where you stand, so we need to test visibility manually.
We need to run AI-driven queries. That is, ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot the same kinds of questions a prospect might ask:
“What are the top solutions for [your category]?”
“Which vendors offer [specific capability]?”
“Who are the top competitors to [your company name]?”
Of course, unlike with Google Searches where the input field is small, with much larger AI chat windows, we typically add more detail and context to our questions.
We may also need to vary the way we ask. AI models interpret questions differently. Try both broad and specific phrasing to see if your brand appears across multiple types of queries.
We need to check citation patterns. Increasingly AI models, following Perplexity, provide sources. Is your brand being cited? Are competitors showing up instead?
We may have our personal favorite AI to use, but we need to compare across AI models. Not all AI tools retrieve information the same way. If we appear in one model but not another, that’s a clue about gaps in our content distribution.
If our brand and solutions are being mentioned (great job!) now we can go deeper. How is it described? Is the messaging accurate? Are key differentiators clear? If not, we may need to check for consistency and improve how our brand is positioned across the sources AI pulls from.
And here’s something else to watch for: AI agents are already visiting websites.
A Seer Interactive study found that OpenAI’s Operator AI agent interacts with websites but often appears as Bing/organic traffic in Google Analytics 4 (GA4). But there are nuances and it depends on how the Operator is instructed to work. The Seer study is worth checking out. Ultimately, this means AIs may already be crawling our content, and tracking their visits can provide insights into how models access and process our information.
Great insights. In so many ways, this is all about providing content in a way that’s simple to consume and understand…which we should be doing regardless so human buyers can also easily engage.