How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode

Before changing anything, ask the assistants what a customer would ask. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Copilot and Perplexity, type the questions that should lead to your business, and note whether you appear, what is said about you and which sources are cited. That is your baseline.

This is not a theoretical exercise. According to Bain & Company (April 2026), 22% of Spanish consumers say they have replaced search engines with generative AI “most of the time”, the highest rate among the countries measured. And when Google itself answers, people click less: Pew Research Center (July 2025, a panel of 900 US adults, using browsing data from March 2025) recorded clicks on a traditional result in 8% of visits where an AI summary appeared, against 15% without one, although Google disputed the methodology.

When an assistant searches the web, it retrieves pages, reads them and writes an answer that cites some of them. Google explains that its AI features run several related searches at once (query fan-out), which is why answers shift with wording, language and timing. This is the territory of GEO, which we explain in our guide to what GEO is.

• Write ten to twenty real questions: by category, by problem, by comparison and by your brand name.
• Repeat them in English, in Spanish and in your customers' other languages.
• Record whether you are mentioned, whether what is said is accurate and which sites appear as sources.
• Run the test every month: one answer is an anecdote; a series is data.

The first step to showing up in ChatGPT is technical: its search crawler has to be able to read your site. OpenAI and Anthropic use separate bots for search and for model training, and each one is controlled individually in robots.txt. You can opt out of training and stay visible in answers.

According to OpenAI's documentation, OAI-SearchBot is the one that lets a site surface in ChatGPT search, and GPTBot collects data for model training; both respect robots.txt. Anthropic draws the same line between ClaudeBot (training) and Claude-SearchBot (search), and Perplexity indexes with PerplexityBot, which is not used for training.

Google works differently. AI Overviews and AI Mode use the regular Search index, so they depend on Googlebot. The Google-Extended token decides whether your content can be used to train Gemini models and to ground answers in the Gemini app, but it does not affect Search. If you want Gemini to draw on your content, do not block it.

And robots.txt is not the only gate. Since 1 July 2025, Cloudflare has blocked known AI crawlers by default (new domains are asked to choose), so if your site runs through its network you can be invisible to AI search without ever having decided to be. Reviewing the CDN and firewall is part of technical SEO.

• Look in yourdomain.com/robots.txt for Disallow rules affecting OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Googlebot.
• Decide separately whether to allow training (GPTBot, ClaudeBot): that is a business decision, not a visibility one.
• Check your CDN or firewall for a blanket AI-bot block.

To appear in Google AI Overviews and AI Mode you need nothing special: Google states there are no additional requirements. A page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in the results. No AI files, no dedicated markup, no particular optimisations.

Both features are live in Spain: AI Overviews since 25 March 2025, in Spanish and English, and AI Mode in Spanish since October 2025. Both are rooted in Search's core ranking systems, so established SEO remains the base.

What can keep you out is your own directives. The noindex, nosnippet and max-snippet rules remove or limit your presence in Google's AI answers, and Search Console includes a control that lets a site be excluded from AI Overviews and AI Mode. Inclusion is the default: make sure nobody has changed it by mistake.

• Inspect your key URLs in Search Console and confirm they are indexed.
• Look for noindex or nosnippet tags left over from a redesign.
• Check that every service, product or location has its own linked page.

Assistants do not only read your website: they also use the data you hand to the platforms yourself. Google's guide states that Google Business Profiles and Merchant Center feeds help your services and products appear in AI responses as well as in classic results.

If you serve the public, your profile is a primary source. Google retired profile Q&A in late 2025 and, where the new feature is live, has replaced it with a Gemini-based one that answers from the profile, reviews, photos and website. Whatever is missing from those sources, that feature cannot pass on. This is the work of local SEO, and it matters most in sectors such as hospitality and tourism.

Structured data helps describe unambiguously who you are and what you offer, but Google says it is not required for its AI features, and FAQ rich results stopped showing on 7 May 2026. Types such as Organization, LocalBusiness or Product remain useful, provided they reflect what the page shows.

• A complete profile: categories, services, hours (including seasonal changes), recent photos and links.
• Identical name, address and phone number on the profile, the website and directories.
• If you sell products, a Merchant Center feed with price and availability in sync with the shop.

The content that most helps AI recommend you is the content only you can publish. Google's guide names non-commodity content, with an original, first-hand or expert perspective, as the most influential long-term factor in generative AI search.

The reason is simple: an assistant can already write a list of general tips, so it has no need to cite you for that. What it lacks is your data, your process and the questions customers put to you every week. “Five tips for choosing a language school” is interchangeable; “What we changed in our method after preparing working adults for C1” is not.

Write for people: open each block with the direct answer and leave the detail for afterwards. There is no need to chunk content or rewrite it “for AI”; Google lists both among its myths. Organising information this way is the core of AEO, and turning what you know into an editorial plan is the job of content marketing.

• Service pages that explain your process, timings and who the service is not right for.
• “How to choose” guides and comparisons with clear criteria.
• Your own data: measurements, tests and documented examples.
• Visible authorship and native versions in each language, not machine translation.

Assistants do not rely on your website alone: their answers also cite what others publish about you. Among the sources that came up in your initial test you will usually find, alongside company websites, media outlets, sector directories, comparison sites and review platforms. Your reputation beyond your own site is part of the work, on one condition: it must be genuine.

Google is explicit on both counts. Its guide lists chasing inauthentic “mentions” among the myths, and in July 2026 it added a rule against fake and undisclosed incentivised reviews to its review snippet guidelines.

The legitimate route is to earn the mention: publish data or analysis a journalist would want to cite, take part in your sector's associations and keep complete profiles in the directories your customers really consult. This is the territory of digital PR.

The same applies to reviews: ask real customers, with no hidden incentives, and reply to all of them, including the negative ones. Online reputation management turns that task into a steady process. In sectors where advertising inside AI is more limited, such as clinics and private healthcare, this organic route matters even more.

An assistant can only recommend you with confidence if it is clear who you are. For that, your name, activity, location and offer must say the same thing on your website, your Google profile, social networks and directories. When sources contradict each other, the answer may do so too.

An “entity” is your company understood as something identifiable: a name, a category, people and places. Start with an “About” page that says plainly what you do, for whom and where, with the details Spanish law (the LSSI) requires a business website to publish, such as the registered name, tax number and address.

Describe what you do in the same words every time. If you are a “dental clinic” on your website, a “dentistry centre” on your profile and a “cosmetic dental studio” on LinkedIn, you are forcing the assistant to guess. This groundwork is what we organise into a GEO programme.

• The same trading name, address, phone number and domain on every profile.
• Organization markup with your logo, contact details and links to official profiles.
• Old, duplicate or closed-location profiles corrected or removed.

AI visibility can now be measured with official tools, though not in the way classic SEO is. Search Console shows your site's impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Bing Webmaster Tools shows citations of your pages in Copilot.

Search Console's generative AI performance reports have been available to all websites since 31 August 2026. They show impressions, pages, countries and devices, but no clicks or CTR: read them as a signal of presence, not a measure of traffic.

Bing Webmaster Tools launched its AI Performance report in public preview in February 2026, with citations of your pages in Microsoft Copilot and Bing's AI summaries. Complete the picture with your monthly question series and with the sessions reaching your analytics from the assistants' domains.

There are no reliable tricks to rank in ChatGPT, and several of those in circulation can harm you. Google has published its own list of myths and, since May 2026, its documentation has stated that spam policies also apply to generative AI responses in Search. These are the practices to avoid.

GEO and AEO are industry labels, not platform standards: Google warns that many of the “hacks” sold under those names are not effective in its search engine. Faced with any “AI ranking” proposal, ask what will be done, which official sources it rests on and how it will be measured.

• Mass-produced pages for every question variant: creating them mainly to manipulate rankings or AI responses violates Google's scaled content abuse policy.
• Buying mentions or reviews: Google lists inauthentic mentions among its myths, and its guidelines rule out fake reviews.
• Betting everything on llms.txt or markup: Google Search does not use llms.txt, and structured data is not a requirement.
• Paying for guaranteed positions: no platform offers an assured place in the organic answer.

Yes, in Spain you can now pay to appear in ChatGPT, but as an ad, not as a recommendation. ChatGPT ads have been serving in Spain since 24 August 2026, on the Free and Go plans only. An ad is a paid placement: it does not turn your brand into the assistant's organic answer.

In the European Economic Area, ads are contextual for now: they are selected by conversation topic, approximate location and language, and are not shown alongside conversations about health or politics. It is a new channel: we explain it in our guide to ChatGPT Ads in Spain and manage it as part of AI advertising.

The rest of the map, as of October 2026: on Google, ads can appear above or below AI Overviews in Spain, but ads inside the overview run only in twelve English-language markets, and Spain is not one of them; in AI Mode, ads are being tested in the United States only. Neither the Gemini app nor Claude carries ads.

The next step is no longer AI recommending you but AI acting: an agent that compares, books or buys on the customer's behalf. In Spain this is still at an early stage, but it is worth preparing your site: Google's guide explains that browser agents may read the DOM and the accessibility tree of a page, so a semantic, accessible website is also easier for them to use. We explore this in agentic commerce.

If you want to know how the assistants see you today and where to start, get in touch.