To get AI to say good things about your business, you have to influence the pages it reads before it answers. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google’s AI Mode about your company, the response is mostly a summary of the pages the model cited. Change those pages, especially the ones on your own website, and you change what AI says.
At TJ Digital, we run AI search optimization for roughly 40 to 50 client websites and track around 4,000 AI prompts per day across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. AI-referred visitors convert at about 8x the rate of traditional search visitors, so what AI says about you is worth getting right.
Why a Recommendation From AI Matters More Than a Top Ranking
A recommendation from AI carries more weight than a top spot in search results, and in a lot of cases it carries more weight than a recommendation from a person. People tend to trust what AI tells them about a business. By now, almost every business owner I talk to has already asked AI what it thinks of their company.
People increasingly ask AI for its opinion before they buy anything or hire anyone. In recent consumer research, the majority of consumers said they had already used AI tools like ChatGPT to shop online. That share is climbing, and the businesses AI speaks well of are going to win a growing share of new customers.
Can You Just Ask AI What It Thinks of Your Business?
You can, but you should not trust a single answer. These are probabilistic models, so they give a slightly different response every time. The way you phrase the question changes the answer too, which means one lucky or unlucky prompt tells you almost nothing.
A better approach is software that runs a range of prompts every day and tracks how AI talks about you over time. We use Peec.ai for this. It shows you the prompts where you show up, the prompts where a competitor shows up instead, and how that shifts week to week.
The next thing most owners do is ask the AI why it said what it did, and that answer is not reliable either. AI does not actually know why it recommended you, so it answers from its training data the same way it answers anything else. To find the real reason, look at the pages it cited before it responded.
Why AI’s Answer Is Really a Summary of the Pages It Cites
When you read the pages AI cited, you tend to notice something. Most of the time, the response is a summary of what those pages say about you. The model is repeating the consensus of the sources it pulled, and whatever those pages emphasize is what shows up in the answer.
That gives you a clear job. To get AI to say good things about you, the pages it cites need to say good things about you. You can do that in two ways, by changing the pages AI already cites or by creating the pages yourself.
How to Change the Pages AI Already Cites
Start with the easy wins. A few common ones:
- An outdated directory listing you can correct
- A Reddit thread where you can add a helpful comment
- A review site where you can ask happy customers to leave a review
These are usually quick to fix and worth doing first.
You will run out of easy wins fast. After that, you are emailing the publishers of the articles AI cites and asking them to mention you, and you should not expect more than about a 5 percent response rate. This work of earning mentions on the pages AI trusts is called recommendation building, and it is one of the higher-impact things most businesses can do.
Why Your Own Website Is the Best Place to Start
The more reliable way to influence those pages is to create them yourself. If AI is citing places like Reddit, LinkedIn, or Medium, you can publish content there. Most of the opportunity, though, is on your own website.
Here is the part most people miss. When someone asks AI specifically about your company, that is a branded search, and your website is the number one authority in the world on your brand. If your site clearly answers the questions people ask about you, AI will usually pull from it.
So figure out the exact phrases people ask AI about your company, then make sure your website has content that answers them directly. For an immigration law firm, that might be questions like “Is this firm legit?” or “Does this firm handle green card cases?”
Put the question in the page title or in a subheading. If you use a subheading and AI still is not finding that content, create a separate page with that question as the title.
Which Pages Should Be on Your Website?
The three pages I tell every business to build are a reviews page, an awards page, and an FAQ page. Each one answers a common question people ask AI about a business, in a format AI can read and quote.
| Page | The question it answers | Why AI uses it |
| Reviews page | Is this business any good? | Gives AI on-site proof of what customers say |
| Awards page | Has this business been recognized? | AI runs “[industry] awards” searches and looks for evidence |
| FAQ page | Does this business do what I need? | Q&A format is easy for AI to quote directly |
Two of these are worth a closer look. An FAQ page lets you answer dozens of specific questions in a format AI can lift word for word. An awards page gives AI something concrete to point to, because one of the first things it searches for is whether a business has been recognized in its field.
Who Can Help You Show Up in AI Search?
You can do all of this yourself, and the steps above are the right place to start. It takes ongoing work, because what AI cites keeps shifting as the models change.
We do this work for businesses every day at TJ Digital. Contact our team for a free digital marketing audit, and we will show you what AI is citing about your business and where the gaps are.