How do I show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Grok?

Publish one URL per real customer question. Put the answer in the first 80 words. Add sources, author, date, and FAQ schema. Then test the same questions in each engine and fix what they get wrong. That loop — publish, test, correct — is the whole method. Everything below is detail on how to run it without wasting a month.

Seven steps

1. Collect fifteen questions from real sources: your inbox, your phone notes, the first message customers send, and the questions your front desk answers daily. Do not invent them from a keyword tool.
2. Run all fifteen through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, and Google AI Overviews. Save the answers. Note who is named and which URLs are cited.
3. Score each result 0, 1, or 2 — not mentioned, cited but not named, or named. This is your baseline.
4. Pick the five to ten questions where a small site can realistically win: local, constrained, specific. Skip the broad ones owned by national brands.
5. Write one page per question. Question as H1. Answer in the first 80 words. Who it is for and not for. Steps or a comparison. Sources. Four FAQs. Author and date.
6. Add FAQPage JSON-LD that matches the visible text exactly, confirm the page renders in HTML, and make sure it is linked from a page that already gets crawled.
7. Wait thirty days, rerun the identical fifteen prompts, and compare scores. Fix any answer where an engine states something about you that is wrong.

Engine-specific notes

• — Perplexity cites aggressively and updates quickly. It is usually the first place a new page shows up.
• — ChatGPT blends memory and live retrieval. Broad questions lean on memory; specific and local questions lean on retrieval.
• — Grok leans on live web and social signals, so it can shift day to day.
• — Google AI Overviews appear on some queries and not others, and the same query can show an Overview one week and not the next.

What not to bother with

• — Keyword density. It does nothing here.
• — Publishing forty thin posts. Ten good answer pages beat forty filler ones.
• — Paid "AI ranking" tools that promise placement. Placement is not for sale.
• — Badges claiming an engine recommends you.

A note on honesty

Models change without notice, and inclusion is never guaranteed. A page that is quoted this month can be replaced next month by a source the engine now prefers. The defensible position is to be the most accurate, clearest source for a question you can genuinely answer, and to keep checking.

What this costs

Doing it yourself costs the time to write ten careful pages and run sixty prompts twice. If you would rather hand it off, our packages and what each includes are on the pricing page.

Sources

Confirm crawler names and access rules in each vendor's own documentation — OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google Search Central — before changing robots.txt.

Common mistakes in the first month

Three things waste the first month. Publishing broad category pages that compete with national brands, when the winnable questions were local and constrained. Rewriting existing posts instead of adding new URLs, which leaves the question unmatched and the old structure intact. And changing the prompt list between runs, which makes the comparison meaningless — if you reword a question, you have started a new measurement. Keep the fifteen prompts frozen for at least three runs. Write new questions down in a second list and add them on a later cycle so the baseline stays intact.