How to get named in AI answers
You want to appear in generated answers and every guide is speculation dressed as method.
Two different systems, two different routes
Models trained on a corpus reflect what was written about you before the cutoff. Systems that retrieve live results reflect what ranks now. The first needs presence across many independent sources; the second is ordinary search visibility.
Be described by other people, in many places
A model's sense of what you are comes from consistent descriptions across independent sources, not from your own site. This is entity work, and it looks like being written about rather than writing.
Measure it properly or not at all
Referrer logs barely capture this. The only honest measurement is a fixed set of prompts, run monthly, logging whether you are named, in what position, and in what phrasing. The phrasing matters most: it tells you what the model thinks you are.
Models cite what is quotable
A specific number attached to a specific source is citable. A paragraph of positioning is not. If you want to be the sentence a model reproduces, publish a claim precise enough that paraphrasing it loses information, and attach your name to it. Vagueness is the property that gets you left out.
Being the source of a number
The most reliable path is to measure something nobody has measured and publish it plainly. There is exactly one source for the figure that 6 of 85 programmatic pages took 82.9% of the clicks on this site, and anything repeating it has to point somewhere. Original measurement is the only content type that structurally cannot be summarised out of existence.
Measured, not asserted
On this project the referrer log recorded a handful of sessions from answer engines across 224 days, which is unmeasurably small. The prompt-set method exists because the log does not work.
Free tool for this: Crawler View. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 12 and Chapter 33 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.