Free playbook · Updated November 2026
7 ways to get your brand mentioned in AI answers
The AI visibility playbook. Seven plays, each with one thing to do in fifteen minutes.
When a buyer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude or Google's AI Overviews which tool to pick, the answer names a few brands and leaves the rest out. Being one of the names is now part of marketing, and it can be worked on like search was.
This playbook is seven plays, in the order we would run them. Each one says why it matters and ends with one task you can finish in fifteen minutes. None of them needs an engineer, and none needs a paid tool to get started.
Play 01
Write down the questions your buyers ask AI.
You can't improve what you don't check. Search had keywords; AI answers have questions, and buyers phrase them as full sentences: "what's the best scheduling tool for a clinic", "is Fernwick worth it", "Fernwick or Calendly for a sales team".
Questions come in two kinds. Some make the assistant search the web before it answers, usually anything about prices, recent releases, "this year" or a narrow comparison. Others it often answers from what it already learnt in training, like a broad "what is" question about a well-known category. Your own pages can win the first kind this month. The second kind moves slowly, through how often the web talks about you over time.
Knowing which is which tells you where to spend: pages and sources for the questions that trigger a search, steady third-party coverage for the rest.
- 01Write twenty questions a buyer would type before they know your name. No brand names in them.
- 02Ask five of them in ChatGPT and in Perplexity. Note which brands are named, and whether the answer shows sources (a sign it searched).
- 03Mark each question "searches" or "from memory". That split is your first content plan.
Echo runs your questions in every major assistant each week and shows who gets named instead of you. See how
Play 02
Let the AI crawlers in.
An assistant can only cite a page it can fetch. Each company runs its own crawlers and names them in its documentation: OpenAI lists OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search and GPTBot for training, Anthropic lists ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User, Perplexity lists PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode use the normal Googlebot; its Google-Extended setting covers Gemini's training, not Search.
Two things quietly block them. A robots.txt rule or a security setting at your host or CDN that turns away bots it doesn't recognise, and pages whose text only appears after JavaScript runs. Many AI crawlers read the HTML as it arrives, so a page built entirely in the browser can look empty to them.
- 01Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for the bot names above. Make sure the search and user bots are not disallowed.
- 02Check your CDN or host's bot settings (some block AI bots by default) and decide on purpose which ones you allow.
- 03Open your pricing page with JavaScript switched off in your browser's settings. If the prices disappear, so do they for many AI crawlers.
Echo's AI crawlers page shows which AI bots visit your site and which pages they never reach; the free AI score checks your robots.txt. See how
Play 03
Be in the search indexes the assistants use.
When an assistant searches, it rarely crawls the whole web on the spot. It asks a search index and reads the top results. Google's AI features draw on Google's own index, Perplexity runs its own, and ChatGPT and Claude use search providers that are not always Google. A page that ranks well on Google can still be missing from the index an assistant asked.
The fixes are old-fashioned and cheap: submit your sitemap to more than one search engine, tell them when pages change, and check that your key pages appear when you search for them by name.
- 01Add your site to Bing Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap. It takes a few minutes if you already use Google Search Console.
- 02Turn on IndexNow (many website builders and CDNs have a switch) so changed pages are announced the same day.
- 03Search for your three most important pages by their exact title in Google, Bing and Brave Search. Note any that don't come up.
Echo's Sitemap lists every page with the AI citations and visits it gets, so a page nobody finds stands out. See how
Play 04
Answer the question in the first lines of the page.
An assistant reading your page is looking for a passage it can quote. Pages that say the answer plainly near the top, with the facts written out (prices, limits, who it's for, what it works with), give it that passage. Pages that open with a slogan and hide the facts behind tabs or images give it nothing.
Think one page per question cluster: a pricing page that states the prices in text, a comparison page per main competitor that is fair about both, and a page for each use case your buyers name. Put a visible "last updated" date on pages where freshness matters.
- 01Pick one question from play one where competitors are named and you aren't.
- 02Find the page on your site that should answer it, and rewrite its first paragraph to answer the question in two sentences.
- 03Add the key facts as a short list or table below it, in text, not in an image.
Echo turns a question you're losing into a content brief and a first draft in your brand's voice, then into an action with an owner. See how
Play 05
Get onto the pages AI already cites.
For many questions the assistant doesn't quote the brands themselves. It quotes a "best tools" list, a review site, a forum thread or a comparison article, and repeats whoever those pages name. If the pages it trusts name three competitors and not you, your own site can't fix that.
The good news is that the list is visible. Perplexity, ChatGPT search and AI Overviews show their sources, and the same pages come back again and again. Each one has a route in: an editor to pitch, a review to ask a customer for, a listing to claim, a thread where an honest answer helps.
- 01Ask three of your questions in Perplexity and open every source it shows.
- 02List the pages that name a competitor but not you.
- 03For each, write down the route in (the author, the review profile, the listing form) and who on your team owns it.
Echo's Mentions lists the pages AI cites next to your competitors, gives the steps for each platform and writes the pitch or reply. A person always sends it. See how
Play 06
Fix what AI gets wrong about you.
Assistants repeat old prices, retired features and the wrong category with full confidence. A buyer who reads that your plan starts at a price you dropped last year may never get to your site to find out.
Wrong answers almost always come from somewhere: an old page on your own site, a stale directory profile, a review site's summary or an outdated article. Fixing the source is what changes the answer, usually after the assistant next reads it.
- 01Ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude: "What is [your brand], who is it for and how much does it cost?"
- 02Underline every wrong fact, and when sources are shown, note where it came from.
- 03Fix the first source today: update your own page, or send a correction to the site that has it wrong.
Echo's FactCheck compares what AI says with your fact sheet and points to the page that taught it the wrong thing. See how
Play 07
Measure it every week and follow the visits.
AI answers change from one run to the next, so one check proves little. What tells you whether the work is paying off is the same set of questions asked on a schedule: how often you're named, how you compare with competitors (share of voice), where in the answer you appear and how you're described.
Then follow the people. Visits from assistants show up in your analytics with referrers such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, claude.ai and copilot.microsoft.com. They are attribution, not proof that one change caused them, but over a quarter they show whether AI is starting to send you buyers.
- 01In Google Analytics, make a segment or exploration for sessions from the referrers above.
- 02Write down today's baseline: how many of your twenty questions name you, in which assistants.
- 03Put a fifteen-minute slot in the calendar every week to look at both numbers and pick the next play.
Echo tracks visibility, share of voice and sentiment per assistant every week, and Results shows the visits from AI per page, with a monthly report. See how
Run the plays every week.
None of this is a one-off project. Questions change, competitors publish, and assistants read the web again. Teams that win AI answers run these seven plays as a weekly habit: check the questions, fix one source, ship one page. Echo is built to make that habit take minutes: it runs the questions, finds what to fix and turns each finding into an action with an owner and a before and after.
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