How to get my B2B company cited in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answers without hiring an SEO agency

You can do this in-house in five steps. Make sure OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot can read your site. Pick 30 to 50 questions buyers ask before shortlisting a vendor. Rewrite the pages that should answer them so the answer sits in the first lines, with specifics. Strengthen the third-party sites engines cite in your category, such as LinkedIn, G2 and Reddit. Then track the same questions every week and fix what is still missing.

What actually makes an AI engine cite a company?

Two kinds of source feed most AI answers: your own site and what others say about you.

• Owned pages carry more weight than most teams expect. Profound's study of 11.84 billion citations across eight models found about 57% came from brand websites, though the share ranged from 47% on ChatGPT to 69% on Gemini, and earned media was only 11.4% for the median SaaS company (Profound).

• Third-party platforms still shape the shortlist. Peec AI's analysis of 30 million cited sources ranked Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn as the top three domains overall, with G2 in Perplexity's top five (Peec AI).

That is good news for a lean team: the biggest lever, your own pages, is fully in your control. You do not need an agency to fix it. You need a list of questions, a few focused rewrites and a weekly habit. Tools can speed up each step, including our own visibility agent, DRIS, covered at the end, but none is required to start.

Step 1: Can the engines read your site at all?

Start here, because no rewrite helps a page an engine cannot fetch.

1. Open your robots.txt. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, and changes take about 24 hours to apply (OpenAI). Perplexity asks sites to allow PerplexityBot to appear in its results (Perplexity). For Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, a page needs to be indexed and eligible for a snippet; Google says there are no extra requirements (Google Search Central).

2. Separate search bots from training bots. Blocking GPTBot opts you out of model training; it does not remove you from ChatGPT search. Decide each on purpose.

3. Check your CDN or firewall. Bot protection rules sometimes block AI crawlers even when robots.txt allows them. Ask whoever runs your hosting to check logs for OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User.

4. Check snippet controls. A nosnippet tag or tight max-snippet limit on key pages keeps them out of Google's AI answers.

5. Fetch your key pages as plain HTML. If your product description only appears after scripts run, confirm a plain fetch still returns it.

Step 2: Which questions should you target?

Pick questions a buyer asks before they contact you, not keywords you want to rank for.

• From sales: the five questions prospects ask on every first call.

• From Search Console: long queries phrased as questions, especially with "best", "vs", "pricing", "alternative" or "for [industry]".

• From People Also Ask boxes on your main category searches.

• From lost deals: which competitor won, and what the buyer said they compared.

Aim for 30 to 50 questions, mostly unbranded. Group them by intent: definition, comparison, pricing, how-to and use case. Write them as a buyer would type them into ChatGPT, in full sentences.

Step 3: How should you rewrite pages so they get cited?

Each target question needs one page on your site that answers it better than anything else.

• Answer in the first two or three sentences under a heading phrased as the question.

• Be specific. Name the use case, the integration, the limit, the price model and the type of customer. Vague claims give an engine nothing to quote.

• Build the pages buyers ask for. Comparison pages against named competitors, an honest pricing page, "for [industry]" use-case pages and an alternatives page. These are the queries where shortlists form.

• Publish your own numbers. Original data, benchmarks and definitions give engines a reason to cite you rather than a summary of you.

• Keep structured data consistent with the visible text, a fundamental Google states for its AI features.

• Refresh on a schedule. Profound found the median page loses half its citation share within 11 days of its peak (Profound). Re-check key pages monthly.

Start with the five questions closest to a purchase. Rewrite, wait two weeks, re-check, then do the next five.

Step 4: Which third-party sources should you work on?

Ask the engines your target questions and note every site they cite that is not yours. That list, not a generic one, is your outreach plan.

• LinkedIn: keep the company page current and have the people who know the product post useful answers. Peec AI notes LinkedIn ranks third overall among cited domains.

• Review sites: a complete, current G2 or Capterra profile with recent reviews, if those sites appear in your category's answers.

• Communities: answer real questions on Reddit or industry forums where your buyers ask them, as a named person, without spam.

• Comparison and listicle pages: ask the authors of "best tools for X" articles that engines cite to review your product.

• Partners: integration pages and partner directories are often cited for "works with" questions.

Step 5: How do you measure progress without an agency?

A spreadsheet works for the first month.

• Columns: question, engine, date, mentioned (yes/no), cited URL, competitors named, notes.

• Ask each question in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity every week, ideally from a logged-out session so personal memory does not colour the answer.

• In Google Analytics 4, watch sessions from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com.

• Every month, count the share of questions where you were cited at least once, per engine.

When the spreadsheet takes more than an hour a week, move to a tool. Self-serve trackers start around $50 to $100 a month, such as Ahrefs Brand Radar custom prompts from $50 or Peec AI from $95 (checked 24 October 2026 on Ahrefs and Peec AI).

What does doing it in-house cost compared with an agency?

Ahrefs' survey of 439 SEO providers put the average agency retainer at about $3,209 a month (Ahrefs). An in-house plan for a team of one or two marketers might look like this:

• Week 1: crawler checks and the question list, about a day.

• Weeks 2 to 6: five page rewrites a fortnight, about half a day each.

• Ongoing: an hour a week of tracking and a few hours a month on third-party presence.

The trade-off is focus. An agency brings repetition and tools; you bring product knowledge, which is what engines quote.

Which mistakes waste the effort?

• Writing for keywords instead of questions. Answer engines respond to full questions.

• Rewriting 40 pages at once. You cannot tell what worked.

• Ignoring the pages you already have. Improving an existing ranked page is faster than publishing a new one.

• Measuring once. Answers vary between runs; one check is an anecdote.

• Blocking crawlers by accident after a security change. Re-check robots.txt and firewall rules after every site release.

Where does Nagent's DRIS fit?

We make Nagent, and its visibility agent DRIS is built for teams doing this without an agency. It works on the Marketing team under MIRA, the AI Marketing Chief of Staff.

• Steps 1 and 5: DRIS shows which AI crawlers fetch your pages (once Nagent's team connects your CDN or host logs), reads Search Console and Analytics, and asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Grok your accepted prompts.

• Step 2: it proposes prompts from your Search Console queries, People Also Ask and query fan-out, shaped by the buyer personas you approve, for you to accept or reject.

• Step 3: it audits pages, then drafts direct answers, FAQ sections, structured data and llms.txt lines as proposals ranked against the goal you set. Approved metadata goes live through a one-time site connection; other fixes arrive as ready-to-paste snippets. Nothing changes on a live page until a person approves.

• Step 4: it lists sites cited beside you, and review pages the engines cite, which can go to Echo, the reputation agent (Beta).

What it does not do: it does not write your outreach or post on Reddit or LinkedIn for you, it does not publish straight to WordPress or Shopify, and backlink analysis is coming soon. Work is metered in credits; an AEO page audit is about 10. See DRIS and pricing.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I get my website cited in ChatGPT answers?

Allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt, make sure key pages answer buyer questions in their first lines with specifics, and build presence on the third-party sites ChatGPT cites in your category. Then check the same questions weekly.

How long does it take to get cited?

It varies. Crawler changes apply within about a day for ChatGPT, by OpenAI's account. Rewritten pages need to be re-crawled and then picked up in answers, so check again after two to four weeks.

Do I need llms.txt to be cited?

Google says its AI features need no new machine-readable files. Some teams add llms.txt as a low-cost extra; treat it as optional, not as the fix.

Does structured data help AI citations?

It helps engines understand a page, and Google asks that it match the visible text. It will not rescue a page that does not answer the question.

Want a second opinion on your first five questions? Book a Nagent demo.