Ask ChatGPT "what is the best invoicing tool for freelancers" and it will hand back three or four names in a sentence. That short list is the new shelf. If your product is not on it, you are invisible at the exact moment someone is deciding what to buy.
The good news: those mentions are earnable, and they do not require gaming anything. They reward the same things good marketing always has, just measured differently. Here is what actually moves the needle.
1. Lead every page with a direct, quotable answer
Answer engines lift the first self-contained explanation they find. If your homepage opens with "Reimagine your workflow", there is nothing to quote. If it opens with "Acme is invoicing software for freelancers that sends recurring invoices and chases late payments automatically", a model can repeat that almost verbatim.
A simple test: read your first two sentences out loud. Could a stranger now explain what you do and who it is for? If not, rewrite them before anything else.
2. Get talked about on pages you do not own
Models learn who to recommend from the wider web, not just your site. The brands that get named are usually the ones showing up in Reddit threads, review sites, and "best of" roundups.
- Answer real questions in communities where your buyers already hang out (for a dev tool, that might be r/webdev or Hacker News).
- Get listed on the directories and review sites in your category, like G2, Capterra, or AlternativeTo.
- Earn a spot in a few honest "best X" articles, even if you are not number one.
You are not trying to spam links. You are trying to make sure that when a model looks for who matters in your space, your name keeps showing up.
3. Make your pages machine-readable
A model can only cite what its crawler can reach and parse. Three checks cover most of it:
- Allow the AI crawlers in robots.txt: GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended.
- Add structured data (JSON-LD) for your organization, products, and FAQs so the meaning is explicit, not guessed.
- Publish an llms.txt that points to your most important pages in plain text.
4. Write the honest comparison pages
Comparison and alternative pages ("Acme vs Rival", "Rival alternatives") are some of the most cited content in AI answers, because they map directly to how people ask. Write them honestly. Admit what a competitor does better. Models, and readers, trust the source that is not pretending to be perfect.
Rule of thumb: if you would not say it on a sales call, do not write it on a comparison page. Credibility is the whole game.
5. Measure it, do not guess
You cannot improve what you cannot see. Run the questions your buyers actually ask through the engines on a schedule, and watch whether you get named, where you rank in the list, and which sources the model cited. That feedback loop is exactly what TrustSEO automates, but even a manual weekly check beats flying blind.
Start with the first point this week. A clear, quotable opening line is the cheapest win on this list, and it helps your human visitors just as much as the machines.