A potential customer doesn’t Google you anymore. They open ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity, type in their problem, and ask which companies solve it.
If your name doesn’t come up, you didn’t lose the search. You were never in the conversation.
How do you increase AI visibility is the shift most companies between $1M and $15M haven’t fully priced in yet. SEO built for Google still matters, but AI-powered search operates differently, pulls from different sources, and rewards different things.
Companies that understand that now will own real estate in those answers.
Why This Isn’t a Single-Channel AI Visibility Fix
The instinct is to treat AI visibility like traditional SEO. One set of fixes, one platform, one agency. That’s the wrong mental model.
ChatGPT and Claude draw primarily from training data. They make a judgment call about which companies are credible enough to mention. They also pull live web content through retrieval-augmented generation, which means a fresh, well-structured page can get cited faster than old SEO timelines allowed. You are not just optimizing for a crawl. You are building the case for why an AI should trust and reference your brand.
Perplexity works most like traditional search. Strong domain authority and regularly updated content drive citation rates directly. If you have done solid SEO work, this is where you will see it pay off first. It responds to the same inputs, just at AI speed.
Grok is different from both. It pulls from live web content and real-time X conversations simultaneously. Your brand’s visibility in Grok is shaped by what your site says and by what people are saying about you on social. An active, credible presence on X moves the needle here in a way it simply does not on the other platforms.
Is your business showing up when buyers search on AI?
Most companies don’t know whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini recommends them…or names a competitor instead. A free AI Visibility Snapshot shows you exactly where you stand on these platforms in under 48 hours.
What Actually Gets You Cited in AI
The companies that show up in AI answers consistently are not always the biggest names in their category. They are the clearest ones.
Four things determine whether AI platforms can find, trust, and cite your brand:
- Brand and company clarity. Every core page on your site should explicitly define who you are, what markets you serve, what you build or offer, and who your buyers are. Not implied. Not buried in a sixth paragraph. Stated clearly enough that an AI can extract it and repeat it accurately.
- Schema markup. This is structured data that tells AI platforms your service type, service lines, service areas, and locations. Launching or rebuilding a site without this is leaving signal on the table.
- Content structured for citation. FAQ sections on every service page. Short declarative paragraphs. Headers that mirror the questions your buyers are actually asking. This is what gets you cited rather than skipped.
- Location specificity. AI is highly attuned to geography. A buyer asking about a service in one city gets different results than a buyer in another. If you are expanding regionally or nationally, individual location pages are not optional. They are how you exist in market-specific AI conversations.
The Next Layer: Web MCP for AI Visibility
The current work is about making your site legible to AI. The future is about giving AI a tool it can actively call.
This is early-stage for most companies at this revenue level, but the organizations building this infrastructure now will have a structural advantage when AI-native search becomes the dominant traffic source. The question isn’t whether that happens. The question is whether you’re positioned when it does.
Where to Start for AI Visibility
Most companies don’t have a clear picture of where they currently stand in AI search results. They haven’t tested what ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Grok says when someone asks about their category. They haven’t audited whether their site structure supports citation. They haven’t checked whether a buyer in a new market would even find them.
That is the starting point.
An AI Visibility Audit looks at how your brand shows up across the major AI platforms, what your site structure is actually communicating, and where the gaps are between what you offer and what AI can find and repeat.
FREE AI Visibility Snapshot
Your buyers are asking AI who to call. Are you in the answer?
Hekate Strategies partners with multi-location and investment-backed companies to unify marketing strategy, digital infrastructure, and performance execution.
Alyssa Pfennig
I hope you enjoy reading this blog post. If you want my team to just do your marketing for you, click here.