A quiet shift is reshaping the way companies get discovered. For twenty years, the strategic question was how to appear on the first page of Google. Over the last few months, a new question has been added, and it is gaining ground rapidly: how to be cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini when a prospect asks them for a recommendation.
The phenomenon is no longer marginal. A growing share of executives, marketing leaders and even private buyers now turn to a conversational assistant as their first reflex before a purchase or an introduction. They no longer type "best digital agency London" into Google. They write to the AI saying "I am looking for a serious agency to redesign my website, which one would you recommend". And the AI answers, with names, arguments, and sometimes direct links.
What makes this topic strategic is that no one can buy their way into a conversational answer. There is no equivalent of Google Ads. Ranking depends on what the models have read, retained and judged relevant in their training data and in the pages they consult in real time through search. In other words, your visibility in these answers depends entirely on the quality and consistency of your online presence over time.
Several factors influence the likelihood of being cited. The first is the consistency of your digital identity. If your website, your social profiles, your press mentions and your professional directories all tell the same story, with the same positioning and the same specialities, the model ends up treating your company as a stable reference on that subject. Conversely, a scattered, contradictory or outdated presence goes under the radar.
The second factor is the depth of the content you publish. Conversational assistants value sources that demonstrate genuine expertise through substantial articles, quantified case studies and reasoned points of view. An about page and three generic posts are no longer enough. This is precisely the same logic as the E-E-A-T framework promoted by Google, and that is no coincidence: the models were trained on similar quality signals.
The third factor, still poorly understood, is your presence in trusted third party sources. When Perplexity consults the web to answer, it gives weight to mentions of your company in specialised media, recognised directories, professional forums and transcribed podcasts. Working on your ecosystem of external citations becomes a strategic lever again, as in the heyday of link building, but with a far higher qualitative bar.
There is also a point that agencies entering this discipline quickly discover: models do not only cite the famous brands. They tend to recommend players that match the precise wording of the need. A company that positions itself clearly on a niche, such as "digital agency specialised in law firms", often has a better chance of being cited on that query than a more established generalist that is harder to identify.
Practically, preparing your company for this new logic of discovery requires work similar to a classic SEO audit, with a few new emphases. You need to check that your key pages answer questions phrased in natural language. Make sure your structured data and schema markup are in place. Build a coherent internal mesh between your areas of expertise, your case studies and your articles. And above all, publish regularly content that expresses an identifiable point of view.
This transformation does not signal the end of traditional SEO. Google remains, and will remain for a long time, the main gateway to websites. But a digital strategy that ignores the rise of conversational assistants takes the risk of being absent from a channel that will weigh more and more in B2B and B2C purchasing decisions in the years ahead.
At AKREA DIGITAL, we integrate this dimension into our digital strategy work and our search engine optimisation assignments. If you want to know how your company is currently perceived by the main conversational assistants and what should be adjusted, our digital audit now covers this dimension.