Guide
How to get mentioned in ChatGPT or Perplexity
Direct answer: You improve the odds by getting Indexed (crawlers can read you), Found (pages match buyer questions), and corroborated on other real sites. A mention is when an answer names you. A link is when it points to your URL. They are different outcomes. Nobody can promise ChatGPT or Perplexity will name or cite you. Treat pitches that sell guaranteed placement as marketing, not a contract.
Engine behaviour noted around Oct 2026. Products change without notice.
Mention vs link
- Mention. The answer names your business in the text.
- Link. The answer includes a URL to your site (or shows you as a source).
You can be named with no clickable link. You can be linked as a source without a strong recommendation. In our observation around Oct 2026, ChatGPT often names brands without linking, and Perplexity shows sources with links more often. That is a snapshot, not a rule. Track both so you do not celebrate a mention as if it were traffic.
More detail: Indexed, Found, Mentioned.
Crawl readiness first
If search and AI search crawlers cannot fetch the page, later steps do not matter. Check robots.txt for Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot. Fix blanket Disallow: / mistakes. Keep important text in HTML. Avoid accidental noindex. Submit a sitemap. Use IndexNow for Bing and its partners when you change URLs. Google does not use IndexNow.
Free checks: AI crawler robots.txt checker · site snapshot. Timing expectations: how long indexing takes.
llms.txt is optional crawl-readiness only. Google Search ignores it for rankings and AI Overviews. It does not buy mentions. See Is llms.txt worth it?.
Pages that answer buyer questions
AI systems that use the live web still lean on clear, useful pages. Give each important URL one primary question. State the answer near the top. Cover who you help, what you sell, where you work, and how pricing works if you publish prices. Comparison and alternatives pages help when buyers ask “X vs Y”. This is the Found step. It is ordinary SEO done carefully, not a secret ChatGPT switch.
Corroboration on other sites
Answers often lean on more than your homepage. Honest third-party signals help: directories you actually belong in, listicles that earned inclusion, reviews from real customers, press that is true. Do not buy fake reviews or farm inauthentic mentions. That risks trust and can backfire. Corroboration supports Mentions work. It still does not guarantee a citation.
How to measure
Pick a fixed set of prompts your buyers would ask. Run them on a schedule across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and any other engines you care about. For each run, log whether you were mentioned, linked, partially correct, absent, or wrong. Note the date and model or mode when you can. Twenty to thirty prompts is directional, not a statistical study. Answers vary between runs, so treat one screenshot as a sample, not a ranking.
What we do not promise
- No guaranteed ChatGPT or Perplexity mention, citation, or link.
- No guaranteed Google or Bing rank.
- No claim that IndexNow or llms.txt alone will get you mentioned.
- No control over how vendors change retrieval or citation behaviour.
What you can control is crawlability, page clarity, authentic corroboration, and honest measurement.
If you want this done for you
Trendi helps any business get found. Trendi is a done-for-you SEO and AI-visibility service at trendibizz.com; we work worldwide. We ship Indexed, Found, and Mentioned work as separate outcomes, with mentions and links logged separately, and a Monday report in plain English. Pricing is on the homepage. Or start with one sentence on the start form / contact.
Related: AI visibility · AI SEO in New Zealand · Trendi vs FirstIndex vs DIY.