I talk to a lot of founders and marketing leads who know their brand isn't showing up in ChatGPT or Perplexity and have no idea where to start. They've read the think pieces about Generative Engine Optimization. They know it matters. But the gap between "this matters" and "here's what I'm doing about it Monday morning" is where most people get stuck.
This post is the Monday morning version. Three things. No specialist tools required. Things you can actually finish in an afternoon.
First: run the baseline test (20 min)
Before you do anything else, you need to know where you actually stand. Open Perplexity and ChatGPT in two tabs and run these three queries, replacing [your category] with whatever you do:
1. "best [your category] tools for [your buyer type]"
2. "[your brand name] alternatives"
3. "how does [your category] work" or "what is [your category]"
For each query, note: does your brand name appear? If not, who does appear? Write it down. This is your before state. Every fix you make in the next three hours is measured against this.
Hour 1: check whether AI crawlers can even reach you
Go to yourdomain.com/robots.txt right now. Look for any of these:
User-agent: GPTBotUser-agent: ClaudeBotUser-agent: PerplexityBotUser-agent: Google-Extended
If any of them are followed by Disallow: / — you're blocking the AI engine that crawler belongs to from reading your content. It literally cannot cite you because it cannot read you.
Remove the Disallow lines for any AI crawlers you find blocked. While you're there, add an Allow: / line for each one explicitly. Takes 5 minutes, deploys in the next build cycle.
Hour 2: fix your entity signal
View the source of your homepage. Search for Organization. If you have Organization schema, look for a sameAs property. If it's missing entirely — or only lists your Twitter — this is your biggest single fix.
Add sameAs links to: your LinkedIn company page, your Crunchbase profile (create one if you don't have it — free), your G2 or Capterra listing (free to claim), and your Wikidata entry if you have one.
Why this matters: AI engines use sameAs to confirm your brand identity. Without it, they can't be confident the "Acme" on your website is the same "Acme" they've seen elsewhere — so they avoid citing you to prevent a hallucination.
This is the fix that consistently produces the clearest citation rate improvement in my audits. It can be implemented in an hour if you have CMS access.
Hour 3: restructure one page
Pick your highest-traffic page that addresses a category-level question — your homepage, your main product page, or your best blog post. Do two things to it:
Rewrite the H2s as questions. "Our approach to [X]" → "How does [your product] handle [X]?" Same content. Different heading. Now the AI retriever can match the heading to a buyer's query.
Add a direct-answer paragraph under each heading. The first paragraph under each H2 should answer the heading's question completely in under 60 words. The rest of the section can elaborate. But the first 60 words must stand alone as a complete answer.
Do this for one page today. That's enough to start seeing citation movement within 30 days.
What to expect
These three fixes will not make your brand the dominant AI citation in your category overnight. That takes 90 to 120 days of compounding work — entity signals, content restructuring, authority signals, the full methodology I cover at Sable Search.
But these three things will start the clock. They remove the most common blockers that prevent citation entirely — the crawl block, the entity ambiguity, the unextractable content. Once those are gone, you're in the game.
Run the baseline test again in 30 days. The delta is your starting point for deciding what to prioritize next.
Want to see exactly where you stand right now?
I run a free 5-prompt GEO snapshot — your brand tested across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews vs. your top competitor. One page PDF, 48-hour turnaround.
Get the free snapshot ↗Frequently asked questions
Open Perplexity and ChatGPT and run 3 to 5 category queries — the questions your buyers would ask when researching options in your space. Note whether your brand name appears. Also run "[your brand] alternatives" to see how you appear in comparison contexts. This baseline test takes about 10 minutes.
Check robots.txt to make sure AI crawlers are not blocked. Add a complete sameAs array to your Organization schema. Restructure the first paragraph under your top page headings to be a direct answer under 60 words. These three changes can be implemented in a few hours and produce measurable citation rate improvements within 30 days.