Answer engine optimization

How to get cited by ChatGPT using Claude

ChatGPT does not recall your brand from memory. It retrieves a handful of pages and writes its answer from them, so getting cited means getting onto those pages, in a form it can lift. With Claude, the workflow is: find the buyer questions where ChatGPT names a competitor instead of you, look at which URLs it keeps citing for those questions, and publish a page that out-answers them - leading with the answer, structured as a table or list, and honest about where competitors genuinely win. Then re-measure a few weeks later, because publishing without re-measuring is guessing.

How ChatGPT actually decides who to name

When a question implies recency or a recommendation, ChatGPT searches the web and writes its answer from the handful of pages it retrieves. It is not recalling your brand from training data - it is reading a few pages, right then, and summarising them. So the question is not 'how do I get into the model', it is 'how do I get onto the pages it pulls'.

What moves the number on ChatGPT

1. 1Get named on the third-party pages it retrieves - the roundups, comparisons and 'best X for Y' listicles that already surface for your query. Being in someone else's list beats a page on your own domain, because the model treats an independent source as more trustworthy than a vendor claiming to be the best.
2. 2Answer the exact question in the first 100 words of your own page. The model lifts the passage that answers the question; if yours starts with a brand story, it lifts a competitor's.
3. 3Publish a comparison table that names your competitors honestly. Tables survive chunking intact and get quoted more than prose, and a page that surveys the field is the kind of source a model cites when asked to survey the field.

Doing it with Claude

An AI assistant that can search the web, read pages, and write long-form content. With the Fulcru skill installed, it runs the whole AEO loop conversationally.

1. 1Install the free `fulcru` Claude Skill. It teaches Claude the playbook: audit a domain, build the buyer question set, find who gets named instead of you, and write the page that closes the biggest gap.
2. 2Ask: "Audit example.com for AI search visibility." Claude fetches the site, works out what it actually sells and who its real competitors are, and writes 10-20 questions a buyer would ask an assistant *before they have heard of you* - which is the only kind of question worth testing.
3. 3Have Claude search each question and record who gets named and which URLs keep appearing. Those recurring URLs are the pages AI reads in your space, and they are the real target.
4. 4Pick the one gap with the highest buying intent that you could honestly win, and have Claude write the page: answer in the first 100 words, comparison table naming competitors honestly, specific steps with real numbers.
5. 5Publish it. Then re-run the same question set a few weeks later and compare. The comparison is the only thing that tells you it worked.

What this will not do

The part everyone skips

Re-measuring. A published page that you never check is a belief, not a result. Run the same question set again a few weeks later and compare: were you named in 2 of 10 answers before, and 5 of 10 after? That number is the only thing that tells you the work landed - and when it does not move, that is information too. It usually means the answer set is dominated by a source you have not gotten onto yet.