11 Steps to Rank
in AI Search

Build a list of 10 customer questions for your business. Run each through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google. Screenshot the results. Save them in a doc dated today. That's your baseline — you'll compare it again in 60 days.

Go to bing.com/webmasters. Verify your site (the easiest path: import directly from Google Search Console). Submit your sitemap. Done in 10 minutes. Without this step, the next eight don't matter for ChatGPT.

Every page needs a title under 60 characters that includes the primary keyword and the location/qualifier, and a description under 155 characters that says exactly what's on the page and ends with a benefit. Write them like an AI is reading them, because it is.

Add Organization schema to your home page — name, URL, logo, social profiles, founder. Add FAQPage schema to any page that answers customer questions. Use JSON-LD format (not microdata, not RDFa). Test every page in Google's Rich Results Test before you ship.

Publish a file at /llms.txt with your site name, a one-line description, and a list of your top 20 pages with one-sentence summaries. Update it whenever you publish a major page. Or skip the manual work — the plugin generates and maintains this for you.

Open your robots.txt. Make sure none of those user-agents are blocked. If you can't find robots.txt, your SEO plugin is probably generating it dynamically — toggle the AI-crawler whitelist in plugin settings. Block them only if your content is paywalled.

Rewrite the top of every important page so the primary question is answered in the first paragraph. Use a short TL;DR box (like the one at the top of this post). Then expand. Short sentences. Sub-headings as questions. Bulleted lists where it helps. AI engines reward structure.

Every blog post gets a named author with a real photo and a 2-sentence bio linking to a full About page. Your About page lists actual humans, real credentials, and at least one piece of independent proof (press mention, certification, case study). Add Person schema to author bylines.

Three plays that actually work: (1) Sign up for Source of Sources (the free successor to HARO), Qwoted, and Featured.com. Pitch yourself as a quoted expert in your niche 3x a week. (2) Find broken links on resource pages in your industry — use Ubersuggest or Ahrefs free tier — and email a replacement link to your equivalent page. (3) Publish one piece of original data per year (a survey of your customers, a year-over-year price report, a local industry stat). That single asset can earn 50–200 backlinks over its lifetime. Skip cheap link farms — Google has gotten brutally good at devaluing those, and AI engines mirror Google's trust signals.

Claim your free listing at yelp.com/biz. Fill every field — Yelp's internal ranking rewards completeness, and that's what AI engines see when they parse the page. Pick the most specific category Yelp offers (not "Restaurant" — "Mexican Restaurant"; not "Dentist" — "Cosmetic Dentist"). Add at least 10 photos with descriptive captions. List your services with prices where possible. Match your name, address, and phone EXACTLY to your website footer, your schema markup, and your Google Business Profile — NAP inconsistency is the fastest way to lose AI trust. Respond to every review within 7 days. Pro tip: the "Highlights" and FAQ blocks on a Yelp profile show up disproportionately in AI citations — add concrete, honest answers to the questions your customers actually ask.