{"id":26251,"date":"2026-07-03T10:28:24","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T09:28:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inboundcph.dk\/?p=26251"},"modified":"2026-07-03T10:28:24","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T09:28:24","slug":"ai-search-visibility","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inboundcph.dk\/en\/ai-search-synlighed\/","title":{"rendered":"Get Found and Cited in AI Searches: ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode"},"content":{"rendered":"
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How AI Search Engines Select and Cite Their Sources<\/h2>\n

An AI search engine operates on the same principles as traditional search: Content must be crawled, indexed, and deemed authoritative before it can be considered. This is described in the section on what AI SEO is, and it dispels some of the mystery. An AI assistant doesn\u2019t find sources through some secret channel, but rather relies on the same infrastructure from Google and builds a layer on top of it.<\/p>\n

This layer is called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, often abbreviated as RAG. The assistant doesn\u2019t just respond based on what the model learned during training. When you ask a question, it retrieves relevant sources, reads them, and formulates its answer based on them. The sources it chooses to cite are visible to the user. The rest are not mentioned.<\/p>\n

Two factors determine what appears in the results. The first is the model\u2019s own knowledge base, shaped during training, where established, editorial, and reference-based sources make up the bulk of the data. This explains why an AI assistant treats these types of sources as credible. The second is the ongoing retrieval process, in which fresh and relevant content is incorporated into the response itself.<\/p>\n

One pattern is worth noting right here: What others write about you elsewhere on the web seems to carry a lot of weight when an AI search evaluates who is worth citing. We\u2019ll come back to the figure behind this in the section on authority.<\/p>\n

Platform by platform: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode<\/h2>\n

Visibility in AI assistants isn\u2019t a single game, but several. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Mode draw on different sources and prioritize different things, and a page that\u2019s frequently cited in one place may be absent in another. The advice is therefore simple: Prioritize based on where your customers are actually asking their questions. The following is based on the prompts we regularly run for Danish customers across the four platforms.<\/p>\n

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CHATGPT<\/div>\n

ChatGPT Search<\/h3>\n

It's about becoming a source that the model trusts. ChatGPT tends to rely on authoritative sources and quotable passages.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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PERPLEXITY<\/div>\n

Freshness and Sources<\/h3>\n

It places a high priority on updated content and company profiles. Discipline regarding timing and maintenance is crucial.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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GOOGLE AI<\/div>\n

The Basics of SEO<\/h3>\n

Tightly integrated with Google Search. A solid, classic SEO foundation actually counts twice: in the search results and in the AI layer.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Across all four platforms, one pattern stands out: It\u2019s usually others talking about you who drive the citations, not your own pages. Reddit and Wikipedia are among the most frequently cited sources overall.<\/p>\n

GEO and AEO vs. Traditional SEO: Complementary, Not a Showdown<\/h2>\n

A common misconception is that AI search renders traditional SEO efforts obsolete. It does not. SEO for AI search is built on the same foundation as traditional search engine optimization, and Google itself has stated that visibility in AI Overviews and AI Mode is based on the same principles as regular search. A website that cannot be crawled, structured, or understood by a search engine will not be cited by an AI assistant either. The foundation should not be discarded, but expanded.<\/p>\n

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Study<\/span>A peer-reviewed study by Princeton and others (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024) shows that specific GEO techniques\u2014such as citing sources and adding statistics\u2014can significantly boost a page\u2019s visibility in AI responses.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cYou can rank number 1 on Google, but still be invisible to ChatGPT. GEO is about being chosen, not just found.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014 Henning Madsen, CEO, InboundCPH<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Classic SEO makes you discoverable. GEO and AEO increase the likelihood that you\u2019ll also be chosen when the answer is generated by a machine.<\/p>\n

Structured Data as a Lever for Visibility<\/h2>\n

Structured data is code that you add to your website to tell machines what the content is and who created it. A search engine and an AI assistant can read your text faster and more accurately with explicit signals indicating that this is an article, this is the author, and this is the publisher. The easier the content is for machines to understand, the easier it is to reference. That\u2019s the core of AI search optimization: You\u2019re not only making the content good for people, but also readable by the systems that determine what gets included in the search results.<\/p>\n

Three types are most effective. Article markup (schema.org\/Article) tells the machine that a page contains editorial content with a headline, body text, and publication date. Organization and Person build sender credibility: They describe the company behind the content and link a named author to the content using a `sameAs` field that points to the author\u2019s other profiles. For a machine assessing a source\u2019s credibility, a clear and verifiable author is a meaningful signal.<\/p>\n

FAQPage (schema.org\/FAQPage) also exists, but there\u2019s a nuance worth noting here. Google has announced that FAQ rich results will no longer appear in Google Search as of May 7, 2026. This doesn\u2019t make the FAQ schema useless, but don\u2019t include it just to try to get a rich result that\u2019s no longer there. Use it only when an FAQ is actually useful to the reader on the page.<\/p>\n

One principle ties it all together: The schema must match the visible content. Never mark up anything that isn\u2019t on the page. Incorrect markup undermines the very trust that determines whether a machine will choose you. The implementation itself belongs in In-Depth Technical SEO<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Content structure being cited: \"Answer-first\" and standalone passages<\/h2>\n

An AI assistant almost never reads your page the way a human does, scrolling from top to bottom. It looks for passages it can extract and reproduce directly. That\u2019s why AI search optimization is just as much about how the content is structured as it is about what it says. A page can have the right answer and still be overlooked because the answer is buried under three paragraphs of introduction.<\/p>\n

The most well-documented strategy is to make the conclusions citable. The peer-reviewed study by Princeton et al. (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024, 10,000 queries) found that citing sources and adding statistics and quotes can boost a page\u2019s visibility in AI responses by up to 40 percent. This is no guarantee for your page, but it offers a clear direction: Content that is itself accurate, well-sourced, and concrete is retrieved more often.<\/p>\n

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