Every second, AI assistants answer questions like "what's the best project management tool for small teams?" or "who does good web design in Toronto?" — and they name names. If your brand is one of them, you get high-intent customers with zero ad spend. If it isn't, your competitor does. Here are six moves that reliably improve your odds.

1. Make your brand facts boringly consistent

Language models learn who you are from thousands of scattered mentions. If your name, description, location, and specialty vary across your website, LinkedIn, directories, and press, the model's picture of you blurs — and blurry entities don't get recommended. Write one canonical description of your company and enforce it everywhere. Same name, same claims, same category words.

2. Publish an llms.txt file

The emerging llms.txt standard is a markdown file at your domain root that gives AI crawlers a clean, structured summary of who you are and what your key pages contain. It costs an hour and removes all ambiguity about how models should describe you. (Here's ours.) While you're at it, check that your robots.txt actually allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot — many sites block them by accident.

3. Structure content so it's quotable

LLMs and answer engines prefer content they can lift cleanly: a clear question as a heading, a direct one-paragraph answer under it, then supporting detail. Rewrite your cornerstone pages in this shape. Add FAQ and HowTo schema markup so the structure is machine-readable, not just visually implied.

4. Get mentioned where models look

Perplexity and ChatGPT's browsing mode cite live web sources — and they lean heavily on a recognizable set: industry publications, comparison and "best of" listicles, review platforms, Wikipedia, and Reddit. An honest presence in those places moves the needle more than another page on your own site. Digital PR is now a GEO tactic.

5. Win the reviews layer

Ask an assistant for "the best X near me" and it synthesizes review data — volume, recency, and specifics. A steady stream of detailed reviews on Google, industry platforms, and marketplaces feeds both the AI answer and the human who double-checks it.

6. Measure what the machines say

You can't improve what you don't track. Monthly, ask each major assistant the questions your customers ask — your category, your region, "alternatives to [competitor]" — and log whether you appear, how you're described, and who else is named. That's your GEO scoreboard, and it moves faster than organic rankings ever did.

The compounding part

Notice that none of this is a trick. It's the same trust-building that good SEO always rewarded, pointed at a new set of readers — ones that happen to be language models with millions of users asking them what to buy. Start now, while most of your competitors are still arguing about whether AI search matters.

Want your baseline measured for free? MediaForward's AI visibility report shows you exactly what ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini say about your brand and category today.