HOW-TO · 9 STEPS

How to Get Your Business Cited by AI Assistants

Being cited by ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity takes crawler access, one clear entity, answer-first content, llms.txt and corroboration. In that order.

1.Capture a baseline before changing anything
Run a fixed set of buyer-intent prompts across the assistants and record mention rate and citation rate. Without a baseline you cannot tell later whether any of this worked.
2.Allow the AI crawlers in robots.txt
Check robots.txt for rules blocking GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User, Google-Extended and similar agents, and decide deliberately which to allow. An assistant cannot cite a page its crawler cannot fetch.
3.Publish one canonical entity in structured data
Emit a single Organization or LocalBusiness node with a stable @id, name, address, phone, founding date, founder, sameAs links and a disambiguating description, and reference it from every other node. Two nodes describing the same business is split-entity risk, not extra signal.
4.Rewrite key pages so the first sentence answers the question
On each service and FAQ page, make the opening sentence of every section the direct answer, name the business rather than saying 'we', and state the number where a number exists. Assistants lift paragraphs that lead with the claim.
5.Publish real prices
Put the published price or pricing model on the page and in the Offer markup, identically. Assistants preferentially quote sources that state figures; 'contact us for pricing' cannot be quoted.
6.Add a visible FAQ with matching FAQPage markup
Answer the questions buyers actually ask on the page, and mark them up once per URL. The markup must match what is visible.
7.Publish llms.txt and llms-full.txt
State what you sell, what it costs, where you are and what you do not claim, and check the files agree with the site. This is the first-party source an assistant can read in one fetch.
8.Fix your Google Business Profile and directory citations
Make the name, address and phone an exact-string match across GBP, directories, associations and review platforms, and link them back with sameAs. Assistants retrieve from sources they already trust, and a self-claim alone is weak.
9.Re-run the baseline prompts after four to six weeks
Run the identical prompt set the same number of times and compare rates. Clients typically see movement in 14 to 90 days, measured against a baseline; this is a typical-results claim, not a guarantee.

To get cited by AI assistants, a business needs five things in place: permission for the assistants' crawlers to read the site, one unambiguous entity in structured data, content whose first sentence answers the question, a first-party fact file (llms.txt), and third-party sources that corroborate the site's claims. Then it needs a baseline captured before the work and re-run after it, because the result is measured, not guaranteed.

This is the order Unconventional Group's AEO pass follows. Done in-house it takes a few weeks of effort spread over four to six weeks of calendar time, most of it waiting for crawlers and directories to catch up.

Where this usually stalls

Two places. The first is step 4, because rewriting pages is slower than adding markup and most businesses stop at the markup. The second is step 8, because directory work is tedious and the payoff is indirect. Both are where the citations actually come from.

FAQ

QUESTIONS THIS GUIDE ANSWERS.

Can anyone guarantee that AI assistants will recommend my business?

No. Assistants are nondeterministic, their retrieval changes without notice, and no vendor has a lever that forces a recommendation. What can be done is making a business genuinely more citable and then measuring whether citations changed against a baseline.

Which matters more: my own site or third-party listings?

Both, in order. Your site has to be readable and quotable first, or there is nothing to cite. Then third-party corroboration decides whether the assistant trusts it. Unconventional Group's AEO pass does the on-site half and tells you plainly which half is actually your constraint.

How long does it take?

Clients typically see movement in 14 to 90 days, measured against a baseline captured before the work starts. Several clocks run at once: your pages must be re-crawled, third-party citations indexed, and each assistant's retrieval layer refreshed on its own schedule. This is a typical-results claim, not a guarantee.

What does it cost to have this done?

Unconventional Group's AEO / AI-visibility engineering pass is $1,500 to $2,000 one-time and covers entity and schema work, an answers corpus, llms.txt, crawler permissions, citation seeding and a measured baseline. Ongoing measurement is separate: AI visibility tracking at $200 a month, three-month minimum.

STRAIGHT ANSWER

WHAT WE CLAIM, AND WHAT WE DO NOT.

Clients typically see movement in 14 to 90 days, measured against a baseline we capture before the work starts. This is a typical-results claim, not a guarantee.

We do not offer performance guarantees, we do not promise a specific ranking or a specific number of leads, and there is no “we keep going until it works” clause. What we do instead is measure: a baseline is captured before the work starts, and the same measurements are re-run afterwards, so the change is something you can check rather than something we assert.

RATHER HAVE IT DONE?

A 20-minute call from Edmonton. This guide maps to a published price.

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