“How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?” comes up in almost every conversation about search these days, usually followed by someone trying to sell a package of “AI SEO” markup. Google’s own documentation on the subject is blunt about it: there’s no special structured data, no separate index, and no submission process for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Nothing to buy that magically gets a business cited. So we treated our own site as the test case before changing anyone else’s, and this is what actually changed.
What AI answer engines are actually reading
An AI Overview or a chatbot answer isn’t pulling from a special AI-only feed. It’s reading the same indexed, crawlable page content everything else reads, which means the two things that matter are whether the content is there to find, and whether it says anything specific enough to be worth repeating. A page that opens with three paragraphs of scene-setting before it gets to what the business actually does is asking a lot of a system that’s trying to extract one clear sentence.
Structured data still has a role, just a narrower one than the pitch decks suggest. It doesn’t earn a citation by itself, but it’s one of the surfaces Google’s own documentation says AI features can pull from when the content underneath backs it up, and it only works if it matches what a visitor can actually see on the page. Markup describing something the page doesn’t visibly say isn’t a shortcut, it’s a mismatch waiting to be ignored or penalized.
What we actually changed on kmcspark.com
Three concrete things, not a markup package:
- An answer-first summary on every service page. Before any of the persuasive copy, a plain sentence or two stating what the service is and who it’s for: the kind of sentence that could be lifted whole into an answer without losing anything.
- Named entities stated explicitly, not implied. “KMC Spark” and “Piscataway, NJ” appear as actual text on the page, not just in a logo or a footer graphic a crawler can’t read as easily as a sentence.
- Real FAQ content, kept visible. Google’s classic FAQ rich-result feature was retired in 2026, so if the only reason a business had an FAQ section was to chase that specific rich snippet, that reason is gone. The content itself still earns its place for a different reason: it’s genuinely useful text that answers a real question in plain language, which is exactly the shape an AI system is trying to extract when it summarizes a page.
What this didn’t do
It didn’t guarantee a mention anywhere. Nobody controls whether an AI answer engine decides to cite a given business, the same way nobody controls a page-one Google ranking. What it did was remove the friction that stops a system (AI or otherwise) from being able to accurately describe what the business does and where it operates, in case it’s ever deciding whether to.
Red flags worth watching for
“AI SEO” has become a pitch of its own, and some of what’s sold under that name doesn’t hold up against Google’s own documentation:
- A guaranteed mention. Nobody controls whether an AI system decides to cite a given business on a given answer. Anyone promising a guarantee is promising something outside their control.
- A special “AI schema” package. There’s no separate markup type or index for AI Overviews or AI Mode. If the pitch is a new kind of structured data specifically for AI, that’s not something Google’s own documentation describes as existing.
- Paid inclusion in an AI answer. AI Overviews pull from the regular index, not a sponsored placement. There’s no invoice that buys a citation.
None of that means structured data or content strategy is worthless for this; it means the honest version of the work looks like clear, accurate, genuinely useful content, not a checkbox that gets purchased separately from it.
The honest version of this advice
If a pitch for “AI visibility” leads with a schema package and nothing about the actual words on the page, that’s worth being skeptical of. The words are the part that has to do the work. Structured data can describe them accurately once they’re there; it can’t invent them.
This is the same content work behind KMC Spark’s search and answer engine optimization, applied to our own site first. If you want a plain look at whether your own pages are readable this way, get a free site audit and we’ll walk through what’s actually there versus what a system trying to summarize it would find.