There's a question worth sitting with: when one of your customers asks an AI for a recommendation in your category, does your name come out of its mouth?
For most businesses, the honest answer is “I have no idea.” And that gap is starting to matter, because the asking is already happening. People are quietly replacing “best plumber near me” in the Google box with the same question typed into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude — and getting back not ten blue links to scroll, but a short answer that names one or two businesses and moves on.
That's a different game. On Google you could be result number six and still get the click. In an AI answer there is no number six. You're either in the sentence or you don't exist for that buyer.
Who actually gets cited
This spring, the PR firm 5WPR published something useful: the AI Platform Citation Source Index, which crunched more than 680 million citations across ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude to see which websites these models actually pull from when they answer.
The number one source, across every major engine, was Reddit — cited roughly 40% of the time. Not a glossy brand site. Not a paid directory. A forum full of regular people comparing notes. The models lean on places where humans talk plainly about what worked and what didn't, because that's the kind of text that reads as a real opinion rather than marketing.
Sit with what that means if you run a business. The path to being recommended by an AI runs less through your homepage and more through the places your customers already discuss your category: forums, reviews, Q&A threads, the messy honest corners of the internet. The model is reading the room. You want to be talked about well in that room.
Ranking on page one was about your website. Getting named in an answer is about what other people say about you where the AI can read it.
And the links are getting real
If you assumed this is all upside-down attention with no traffic behind it, that changed too. On May 7, ChatGPT quietly altered how it shows brands — instead of tucking sources into footnotes, it started dropping brand names as clickable callouts right inside the answer. In the window around that change, total referral traffic out of ChatGPT jumped 157.7% week over week, and visits landing directly on brand homepages rose 354.7%.
So being named is no longer just a vanity mention. It's becoming a doorway people walk through, the same way a top Google result was. The doorway is just smaller, and there are fewer of them per question.
What to actually do this month
You don't need to chase every platform. You need to become the kind of business an AI can confidently recommend. Three concrete moves:
Go ask the AIs about yourself. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude and ask the exact questions a customer would — “best [your category] in [your town],” “who should I hire for X.” See if you appear, what they say, and who they name instead. That's your starting scoreboard, and it takes ten minutes.
Get talked about where models read. Reviews on Google and your industry's directories, honest threads on Reddit or niche forums, a few specific customer stories in plain language. You can't fake your way into this, but you can earn it: ask happy customers to leave a real review, answer questions publicly in the places your buyers hang out.
Write your site so a machine can quote it. Say plainly who you serve, where, and what you do best — in normal sentences, not slogans. “We do bookkeeping for retail shops in Austin” is something a model can lift into an answer. “Reimagining financial wellness” is not.
The bigger lesson
For twenty years, getting found meant ranking. The work was tuning your own pages. The new version is stranger and, in a way, more honest: you get recommended by being genuinely well-regarded in the places people talk, then making it easy for a machine to repeat the good thing they said. The middleman between you and your next customer is changing again. Worth knowing what it's reading.