How do you rank in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity?

In the old world, a first page ranking on Google was a lynchpin of brand visibility. For years, organizations vied for the top spot by following the rules of SEO – and they invested heavily to monitor and maintain their position.  

Today, those rules no longer apply. Instead, businesses are rushing to understand how they can rank in LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. Unlike the old days of keywords and marketing claims, optimizing for these machines is about ensuring the world is aware of your flawless track record for CX excellence. Before including a brand in their results, LLMs will evaluate the service and refund processes. They will check financial results to ensure environmental promises hold true. And they will cross-reference customer reviews with marketing claims. Something as simple as conflicting opening hours will flag as a signal of distrust and potentially impact visibility.  

In the agentic commerce environment, Heather Holmes (pictured below), founder and CEO of Publicity For Good, says visibility is now binary: you either show up or you don't. 

Following publication of her book Seen by AI, Found by Customers, she tells CX Network about the importance of a clean data footprint, why earned media is the new SEO, and the non-negotiable milestones in her 90-day implementation blueprint. 

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CX Network: Your new book is called Seen by AI, Found by Customers: The Purpose-Driven Brand's Guide to Dominating the New Era of PR. What do CX practitioners need to understand about visibility in AI search?

Heather Holmes: What CX practitioners need to understand is that the customer journey is no longer a linear path of scrolling through pages of blue Google links. We have completely transitioned into the Answer Economy. Today, consumers are asking conversational platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity for highly-tailored, direct recommendations.

For CX professionals, this means visibility is now binary. 

You are either the single answer recommended by the machine, or you don't exist to that buyer. AI engines act as digital researchers that prioritize "share of model" over traditional link clicks. If your brand isn't structured to be machine-readable, the buyer will not discover you and the customer experience ends before it even begins.

CX Network:What gaps in knowledge are you seeing across the CX / marketing space?

Heather Holmes: The single largest knowledge gap I see is that marketers are still running on a traditional, self-promotional content hamster wheel. They assume that writing more blog posts, accumulating social media likes, or launching flashy marketing campaigns will make them visible to AI.

What they miss is that AI models are explicitly programmed to discount brand bias. To an LLM, your beautifully designed corporate website is viewed as an unverified sales pitch. 

Marketing teams are still optimizing for human eyes without realizing they first have to pass the technical audit of the machine, which requires a completely un-conflicted data structure across the web.

If an AI engine scans the web and finds your current office address on your website, but your old startup address on a press release, or a phone number on an independent directory, it flags a data conflict. 

To an AI, a data contradiction equals a lack of trust. AI will simply filter your brand out of the recommendation entirely. Before you create a new story, you have to do the boring, technical work of cleaning up your data footprint so the machine gets a single, un-conflicted source of truth wherever it looks.

CX Network: What role does earned media play in an AI-first discovery environment?

Heather Holmes: Earned media is the absolute currency of the AI search landscape. Because AI platforms utilize Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to prevent hallucinations or answers that sound completely logical, and persuasive, but are factually incorrect, or fabricated, they require third-party validation before they risk recommending a business. They look to see who else is backing up your story.

Data from MuckRack shows that a staggering 89 percent of all citations generated by major AI models originate from earned media, including independent news articles, trade journal features, and podcast interviews. 

Journalists and independent publications have effectively become the new gatekeepers of your digital visibility. In short, earned media has become the new SEO.

CX Network: How should earned and paid media work together in a discoverability strategy?

Heather Holmes: Earned and paid media must work in a compounding loop, but earned media must lay the foundation. Paid media acts as an accelerator to amplify your reach and keeps your brand top-of-mind for humans. 

However, if you point paid advertising or traffic toward a brand that has zero third-party corroboration on the web, you are throwing money away.

In a modern discoverability strategy, you use earned media to build algorithmic trust with the machine so you are actively cited in AI search results. Once that organic foundation of verifiable data is secure, you deploy paid media to scale that visibility, retarget the high-intent traffic coming from AI recommendations, and dominate your market.

CX Network: Does the approach need to adapt for industries or different business models?

Heather Holmes: While the core requirement for third-party validation remains identical, the execution shifts based on how consumers prompt the machine. 

For instance, in consumer packaged goods (CPG) or retail, the approach centers on semantic depth and use-case visibility. You need to get your products featured in authoritative listicles and recurring roundups (e.g. "Best organic skincare for sensitive skin") because AI heavily scrapes these "best-of" lists to generate consumer recommendations.

For B2B enterprise or technology companies, the approach shifts to topical authority and citable resources. The machine is looking for deep, factual resource sections, whitepapers, and heavy trade journal coverage so it can pull specific data points, statistics, and named frameworks to answer complex business queries.

CX Network: The book includes a 90-day implementation blueprint. What are some of the key actions you recommend?

Heather Holmes: The 90-day blueprint in my book is all about transitioning from casual content creation to strategic content architecture. It is built on a few non-negotiable milestones:

Days 1–30: Practice correction before creation

You cannot build new authority if you are drowning in "narrative debt". You must perform an audit to fix old addresses, outdated executive bios, and inconsistent business descriptions. Your name, address, and phone number (NAP) must be character-for-character identical across all directories to clear out data conflicts that destroy AI trust.

Days 31–60: Build citable depth

Restructure your website to use answer-first formatting. Build detailed FAQ sections where consumer questions are resolved explicitly in the opening sentences, loaded with numbers and unique metrics that the machine can easily extract and copy.

Days 61–90: Climb the media ladder

Launch targeted PR campaigns focusing on local news outlets, niche industry blogs, and podcasts. These external placements create the permanent, credible, and independent data layers that AI engines require to safely recommend your brand.

CX Network: Are there specific visibility tools brands can use to support their earned media strategy?

Heather Holmes: Absolutely. To build a successful earned media strategy for the AI era, you have to move past traditional keyword tools and start looking at what the models actually see.

At Publicity For Good and Signal Raptor, we developed a proprietary tool called AI Search Scan. It allows founders and marketing leaders to run a direct, diagnostic audit of their digital presence across major platforms. It instantly uncovers your explicit narrative debt, flags hidden data conflicts, and reveals exactly where you are missing the third-party citations needed to win the machine's trust. It gives you the exact roadmap you need to move from digital invisibility to the Golden Standard of your industry.

Seen by AI, Found by Customers: The Purpose-Driven Brand's Guide to Dominating the New Era of PR is available to buy now via Books a Million 

Quick links 

• Reinventing search and discovery within a digital ecosystem
• Securing the contact center in the AI era: Prompt injection, consumer privacy, and data integrity
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