The method
How do you improve your AI visibility?
The short answer
Three parts, in this order. Let the engines read your website. Get named on the websites they already read about your market. Publish pages that answer your buyers' exact questions. Then measure again after about 90 days. In our 6 audits of September 2026, the plans held 47 technical fixes, 205 outside websites and 160 page projects.
Published September 22, 2026 · part of our public GEO method · written by Thibault Genon-Catalot, founder
Start from the answers
Where do AI engines find the brands they name?
Mostly on other people's websites. In the 6 full audits we ran in September 2026, in France, Singapore, the Philippines and the United States, the engines wrote 1,762 answers to buyer questions. In 1,348 of them, 77%, they used at least one page of a competitor as a source. So improving your AI visibility starts outside your own site, with the pages the engines already read.
That is also why the order of the work changes from one company to the next. One of our audits needed 15 technical fixes and almost no outside work. Another needed 1 technical fix and 23 outside websites. The measurement comes first because it tells you which part is yours.
| The part | What it means | In our 6 audits | How you know it worked |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Let the engines read your site | Open your site to the AI crawlers, serve your text without JavaScript, date your pages, describe your company the same way everywhere | 47 technical fixes, 1 to 15 per site | The same checks, run again, pass |
| 2. Get named where the engines look | Get your name on the lists, review platforms, articles and forums the engines already read about your market | 205 outside websites to reach | Those pages name you |
| 3. Publish the pages they quote | Write pages that answer your buyers' exact questions, in the formats the engines pick: lists, service pages, guides | 160 page projects | The engines read your pages |
| 4. Measure again | Ask the same questions to the same engines, the same number of times, about 90 days later | 750 to 1,050 measurements each time | Your share of answers, next to the first one |
Part 1
How do you make sure AI engines can read your site?
Check four things first. The AI crawlers must be allowed in by your robots file and your firewall. Your text must exist in the page without JavaScript, because most AI crawlers do not run scripts. Your pages must carry a date that a reader and a machine can see. Your company must be described with the same name and the same sentence on your site and on your profiles.
This part is fully in your hands, and it is usually the shortest. Across our 6 audits it came to 47 technical fixes, between 1 and 15 per website. Passing every check does not get you named on its own: our own site passes 31 of our 35 checks and was named in 0 of 299 AI answers on September 21, 2026. The reason is on our page about scores and citations.
Part 2
How do you get named on the websites the engines read?
List the websites the engines used to answer your buyers, then keep the ones where your competitors are named and you are not. In our 6 audits that list came to 205 outside websites worth working: lists of the best providers, review platforms, articles and forums. Each one is a request to a person, a profile to complete or a place to publish.
Lists deserve the first look. Kevin Indig's Growth Memo found that listicles are the most-cited page type in ChatGPT answers, at 43.8% of 26,283 source URLs, while ChatGPT also cut listicle citations by 30% between December 2025 and January 2026 (August 2026). Lists matter a great deal today, and their weight moves. That is why the work is measured again.
Size matters less than most people expect. In the same 6 audits, 60% of the 3,032 websites the engines read were outside the top 1 million websites. The detail is on our page about domain authority.
Part 3
Which pages should you publish to be quoted?
Publish the kinds of page the engines already read in your market. Across our 6 audits the engines read 3,026 competitor pages: 26% were lists of the best providers, 22% service pages, 17% articles and guides, 14% home pages. Each page should answer one buyer question, with the answer in its first lines, in words a buyer would type.
Put facts on the page that an engine can repeat. The Princeton-led GEO paper (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024) measured that adding citations, quotations and statistics made a source up to 40% more visible in AI answers. A figure with its source and its date is the easiest sentence to quote.
Part 4
How do you know if your AI visibility has improved?
Ask the same questions to the same engines, the same number of times, and compare. One reading means little: in our study of 615 AI answers, the same engine asked the same question 3 times returned the same list of brands 2 times out of 205. The full study is at /do-ai-answers-change-every-time.
We measure again about 90 days after the first reading, with the same questions, the same 5 engines and 3 runs each. We do it on ourselves too: our own share of answers is published every week on /share-of-answer, starting from 0.
Questions
Fair questions about the work. Straight answers.
How long does it take to improve AI visibility?
Plan on about 3 months before you judge it. The technical fixes take days. Getting named on other websites takes weeks, because each one is a request to a person. New pages then have to be found and read by the engines. We measure again after about 90 days, with the same questions, and compare the 2 readings side by side.
What is the first thing to do?
Find out where you stand before you change anything. Ask the engines the questions your buyers type, several times each, and write down who is named and which websites the engines used as sources. That list tells you which of the 3 parts of the work matters most for you.
Does schema markup improve AI visibility?
Treat it as hygiene. Google states in its guidance on AI features that no special markup is needed to appear in them. Structured data still helps an engine tie your website to your profiles, so add it. Do not expect it to get you named on its own.
Do I need to be on Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn?
Only where your market's answers come from. Peec AI's analysis of 30 million cited sources found that Reddit, YouTube and LinkedIn are the three most-cited domains across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews (September 2026). In your own market the list can be very different: in our own audit, linkedin.com was the most used website, in 79 of 299 AI answers.
Can a new company improve its AI visibility quickly?
It can start quickly, and it should expect a slow first reading. The engines answer from what other websites say about a company. nextchannelstudio.com was registered on September 1, 2026, and in our own audit 3 weeks later we were named in 0 of 299 AI answers. Our share is published every week on /share-of-answer, so you can watch the work move it, or not.
Free, 2 minutes
Before you buy any audit: run one free check.
5 buyer questions, 2 AI engines, and you see who gets named instead of you. The verdict shows on the page, and a copy lands in your inbox.
Where to go next
Start with where you stand. Then do the work.
The $1,500 audit is the first reading: 20 of your buyers' questions, 5 engines, 3 runs each, the websites the engines read, the readiness checks, and a 12-week plan in these 3 parts. The AI Visibility Program is the work itself, month after month. How the measurement works is on /methodology, and what free AI visibility scores can and cannot tell you is on /ai-visibility-score.