How to get your brand recommended by AI assistants

How assistants decide what to answer

For buying questions, most assistants don't rely on memory alone. With web search on, they turn the user's question into a few search queries, read the pages that come back, and write an answer from them, often with links. Which brands end up in the answer depends on three things: which pages the search finds, whether those pages state clear facts, and how often the brand appears on sources the model considers reliable.

That makes AI visibility partly familiar SEO work and partly something new: you are optimising for being quoted, not just for being clicked.

1. Measure before you change anything

A single screenshot of an AI answer proves very little: ask the same question twice and you may get different brands. Pick 20 to 60 real customer questions, ask each one several times on each assistant, and track the share of answers that mention you. That rate is stable enough to compare week by week and against competitors.

Good questions come from your Search Console data (rewritten as natural questions), from the topics your product pages cover, and from topics your competitors cover and you don't. Leave out branded and navigational searches: nobody needs an AI to find your login page.

2. Make your pages easy to quote

Assistants prefer pages that state facts plainly. If the price, delivery time or warranty only appears after a click, inside an image or behind JavaScript, it may as well not exist.

• Put the key facts in text near the top: price or price range, what's included, delivery, warranty, who it's for.
• Add a short FAQ that answers the questions you track, in the words customers use.
• Write comparison and “how to choose” pages. They match the questions people ask an assistant.
• Keep one clear page per topic instead of many thin ones.
• Use structured data (Product, Offer, FAQPage, Organization) so the facts are machine-readable.

3. Be present on the sources assistants trust

Look at which websites are cited in answers to your questions. Typically these are price comparison sites, review platforms, forums, industry media and marketplaces. If competitors appear there and you don't, that is often the single biggest reason you're missing from the answer.

Practical steps: complete and update your listings, get reviewed, offer data or expert comments to the media that are cited, and take part in the forum threads that rank for your topics. Track whether your mention rate on those questions changes afterwards.

4. Fix wrong and outdated facts

Old prices, ended promotions and wrong delivery terms in AI answers quietly cost customers. Read what assistants say about you, compare it with your website, and correct the source: your own pages first, then listings, press releases and third-party pages that still carry the old information.

5. Write for the searches the AI runs

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini report the web searches they ran before answering. These are often more specific than the user's question, for example “family mobile plan comparison 2026” instead of “best family plan?”. Collect these queries and make sure a page on your site is a good result for them.

6. Technical checklist

• Important content is in the HTML, not only rendered by JavaScript.
• Your robots.txt doesn't block the crawlers of the assistants you want to appear in, unless you have a reason to.
• Pages load fast and don't hide text behind cookie walls or pop-ups.
• Titles and headings say what the page is about in plain words.
• Prices and dates are current; old pages are updated or redirected.

7. If your customers ask in Hungarian

Hungarian questions get different answers from the same question in English: the assistants search Hungarian sources and often name different brands. Track the questions in the language your customers use. When you count mentions, remember the suffixes: “Telekomnál”, “One-nál” and “Yettelhez” are all mentions, and simple text search misses them.