How do I get my company mentioned in ChatGPT and Perplexity answers?
By being described, accurately and repeatedly, in sources the engines use, and by making sure the engine knows which company you are. There is no submission form, no paid placement in the answer itself, and no technical switch. Anyone offering guaranteed inclusion is describing something that does not exist.
Start by checking what happens now
Before anything else, run three questions and write down the answers with the date.
Ask who your company is. Ask what it does. Ask who it would recommend in your category and city or sector. Do it in both engines, because they behave differently: Perplexity retrieves aggressively and cites, while ChatGPT varies by question and by mode.
Most of what gets sold as an AI visibility programme skips this step, which is how companies end up paying to improve a presence they already had, or optimising pages for an engine that is not reading pages.
The two levers, in order of difficulty
Third party mention. The single biggest factor, and the slowest. Engines weigh what others say about you differently from what you say about yourself. A company covered in trade press, listed in sector directories, cited in industry reports and quoted by name has material to be retrieved. A company whose only footprint is its own site does not.
This is unglamorous, it is mostly public relations and partnerships, and it is the thing that actually moves. It is also why the brands that AI names confidently tend to be the ones that were already well known.
Your own published material. Faster, and it only pays when the engine is retrieving. One question per page, answered in the first fifty words, with sources attached to claims. See What is answer engine optimization?. Whether this works at all for your category depends on which path the engine is running.
The things that do not work
Keyword stuffing. It did not help in the one controlled study we have on generative visibility, and it makes a page worse to quote.
Writing pages that assert your own excellence. Engines synthesise from many sources and a self-congratulatory page is low-value material to quote from. A page that states a verifiable fact about your work is worth more than a page that states you are a leader.
Any vendor guaranteeing placement. There is no inventory to buy. Sponsored placement around AI answers exists in some products and is a different thing, labelled as advertising, and it does not make the model recommend you.
A realistic timeline
Fast, in weeks: fixing a wrong description where you control the source, disambiguating your name, adding structured data, restructuring key pages.
Slow, in quarters: building enough independent mention that a model answering from training data has something to draw on. This is a public relations timeline, not a content timeline, and it does not compress with budget as readily as people expect.
Anyone promising a change in how a model describes you within a month is either talking only about the retrieval path, or not being straight with you.
What to do with it
- Run the three questions in both engines. Record answers and dates.
- Fix identity first if the engine has you confused with another entity. Everything downstream is wasted until that is right.
- Write one canonical company description and use it verbatim everywhere.
- Build third party mention deliberately: trade press, sector directories, industry reports, conference listings, partner sites.
- Make your own key pages answer-shaped, but only after establishing that the engine retrieves for your category.
- Re-run the three questions quarterly, same wording, and keep the log. The log is the only evidence of direction you will have.
If you run the company rather than the marketing
The honest summary is that getting mentioned in AI answers is mostly the same work as becoming well known, which you already knew how to do, running on a longer timeline than anybody selling it will admit.
Two things protect you here. First, insist on the before picture with a date on it. If nobody recorded what the engines said in month zero, nobody can prove anything changed in month six, and you will be shown activity metrics instead.
Second, be suspicious of speed. The lever that genuinely moves this is other people writing about you, which is a public relations timeline measured in quarters. A proposal promising to change how a model describes your company in a month is either describing a much smaller thing than it sounds, or it is not true.
The cheapest useful action available to you today costs nothing: ask both engines who you are, and find out whether the problem is absence, confusion, or a description that is simply out of date.
Sources
No primary literature covers this directly. The retrieval behaviour referenced is from our own dated test in Research, one engine, one country, one day. The finding that keyword stuffing does not improve generative visibility is from Aggarwal et al, arXiv:2311.09735, 2023.