How to get mentioned by AI: a 5-step plan to get ChatGPT to name your brand

When someone asks ChatGPT for the best clinic, bank or agency in their city, the model does not look at each company's ads or homepage. It builds the answer from what other people say about those brands: press coverage, comparison sites, forums, Wikipedia, reviews and videos. That is why getting mentioned by AI depends less on what a company publishes about itself and more on where it is mentioned.

Here we explain that mechanism with data from Chile and from 2025 and 2026 studies, plus a five-step plan for marketing, communications, ecommerce and SEO teams.

Why AI names some brands and not others

ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude are large language models (LLMs): systems trained on huge amounts of text. They answer in two ways. Sometimes they answer from memory, with what they learned during training. Other times they search the web and cite the pages they found.

In both cases the raw material is the same: text published by third parties. If a brand shows up again and again in sources the model considers trustworthy, it becomes associated with its category. If it only exists on its own website, the model treats it as an interested party talking about itself. That third-party coverage is called earned media: coverage a brand neither pays for nor controls, such as a newspaper story, a review or a spot in a ranking.

Our study on deal searches in Chile, Google vs. AI (October 2026) shows the uncomfortable side of memory: Claude searched the web in 43.7% of its answers, and in the rest it even recommended Carrefour, which sold its Chilean hypermarkets and left the country. What was published about a brand for years still carries weight, for better or worse.

Which sources AI uses to decide who to mention

In September 2026 we ran 96 purchase questions with a Chilean context ("what is the best bank in Chile?", "where can I buy a used car?") through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude, and classified the 3,730 citations they made. The full results are in the study Which brands does AI cite in Chile?: 48.6% of citations point to sources outside the recommended brand, and 51.4% to the brands' own websites.

rankia.cl79

reddit.com44

comparaiso.cl44

latercera.com38

en.wikipedia.org36

autofact.cl35

youtube.com29

queplan.cl27

Source: Which brands does AI cite in Chile? study, ESBUENISIMO LINKS, September 2026 (96 prompts, 3,730 citations)

View the data as a table

rankia.cl	79
reddit.com	44
comparaiso.cl	44
latercera.com	38
en.wikipedia.org	36
autofact.cl	35
youtube.com	29
queplan.cl	27

The most cited domain is not a newspaper but a comparison site. The mix also changes by industry: in automotive, telecom, real estate and food, external sources reach 59.6% of citations; in finance, insurance, health and education they drop to 43.8%, because banks', insurers' and health providers' own sites carry more weight. Counting only verified news outlets, the figure is 4.8%: few citations, but very hard for competitors to get.

Each assistant relies on a different search engine, as we explain in how to rank your brand in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini.

Getting mentioned by AI: what the data says

Muck Rack, the PR platform, analyzes the links AI assistants cite every few months. In its October 2026 edition, more than 84% of citations by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity came from earned and third-party sources, journalism accounted for 22% and paid content for just 0.3%.

Ahrefs, the SEO tool, reached a similar conclusion from another angle. In an analysis of 75,000 brands published in May 2025, it measured which factor is most closely related to appearing in AI Overviews, the generated answers Google shows above the results. For readers outside SEO: a backlink is a link from another site to yours, and DR (Domain Rating) is the authority score Ahrefs gives a domain.

Correlation (from 0 to 1) does not prove causation, and Ahrefs says so. But the order is clear: the correlation of mentions is three times that of the number of backlinks. Why unlinked mentions also count is covered in backlinks vs. unlinked mentions.

How to get mentioned by AI in five steps

The plan below is a cycle, not a campaign.

1. Measure what AI says about your brand today

Write 10 to 20 questions a real customer would ask: "best car insurance in Chile", "is this brand reliable?", "alternatives to this competitor". Run them in all four assistants and note whether you are named, in what position, next to whom and with what facts. The share of answers in which you appear versus your competitors is your AI share of voice. You can run a first measurement with our free AI share of voice tool.

2. Find which sources it cites

In each answer, check the links the assistant cites. Group them by type (news, comparison sites, forums, directories, Wikipedia, video). What repeats in your category is your target list. Do it per model: according to Muck Rack, only 212 domains were cited by all four assistants.

3. Earn mentions in those outlets

This is where press and digital PR work comes in: proprietary data a journalist wants to publish, op-eds by your executives, presence in rankings and comparison sites, useful answers in forums and articles in trade media. For sources you can hire, such as articles in digital media, link building in Chilean media speeds up the process.

4. Fix wrong information

If AI says your company has a different owner, an old price or a closed branch, find where it got that. Correct your Google profile, directories, and Wikipedia or Wikidata where appropriate, and publish the right information on a clear page of your site and in a press release.

5. Measure again

Repeat the same questions every month. Answers change even on the same day: Muck Rack found that when a question is repeated, ChatGPT cites only 41% of the same domains again and Perplexity 94%. Run each question several times and watch the trend.

What does not help you get mentioned by AI

Three shortcuts pay off poorly. The first is buying ads and hoping it shows up in AI: paid content is 0.3% of citations. The second is optimizing only your own site. In our deals study, only 54.8% of the sites in Google's top 3 were named by any AI for the same search; SEO is the foundation, but it is not enough. The third is publishing on sites nobody reads, built only to sell links: assistants cite sources people actually use.

For the technical detail of how ChatGPT searches and picks pages, the guide on how to appear in ChatGPT complements this plan.

How long it takes and who should do it

Answers based on web search can change within weeks, as soon as a new article is indexed. What the model knows from memory changes more slowly, because it depends on its next training run. A realistic horizon to see a trend is three to six months of steady work.

The work cuts across teams: communications knows the media, marketing defines the questions that matter and SEO knows how to read the sources. If your team lacks the time to sustain the cycle, a GEO agency like ESBUENISIMO LINKS can measure, earn mentions in real Latin American media and report progress month by month.