How to Get AI Mentions That Send Ideal Clients to Your Website
Someone asking ChatGPT to figure out what’s causing their symptoms, getting sent to your website, and deciding they want to work with you? Yes, please.
But before we get too excited about AI referrals, open up your website for a second. Can someone who's never heard of you figure out what you help with, who your program is for, and why they'd choose to work with you?
Or are we asking ChatGPT to recommend a business whose homepage says "helping women feel their best" and leaves everyone to work out the details on their own?
I say this with love… but there’s probably a much better explanation of your work in a voice note you sent last Thursday.
If you want AI mentions, give it useful, specific information that’s worth finding and referring people to.
That starts with getting more of your expertise onto your website, in language your future clients understand (not just words that impress other practitioners).
Do you need a whole new strategy to get AI mentions?
Short answer? No.
Focus on good SEO basics first. Google says the same SEO foundations that get you found in regular search results also apply to its AI Overviews and AI Mode. There’s no point in searching for the best AI search strategy when you haven’t even added meta descriptions to all your blogs yet.
But that doesn't mean a few quick website edits will guarantee you a spot in an AI answer. Nobody can promise that.
The nice thing is, a lot of this work also makes your website more useful for the humans reading it. Explaining your offer in plain language and giving someone a useful answer helps her decide whether you're the person she's been looking for.
Those same details give search tools more information to work with, too.
So before adding "figure out AI" to your to-do list, let's look at what your website is already telling people (and what it's leaving them to guess).
4 Places I'd Start for More AI Mentions
Stop trying to sound so professional and polished.
Most practitioner websites I see are trying so hard to sound professional or broad enough to include everyone, that it's hard to tell what they actually do.
You've already explained your work a thousand times. Think about the answer you gave on a client call last week or that podcast interview where you got into how you approach symptoms differently.
How much of THAT explanation has made it onto your website?
That unfiltered version of your messaging is THE THING that helps someone understand why you do what you do and what working with you would look like. It’s the thing that makes a person think, "Oh. She gets it."
And yet, the website version is sometimes just... "A personalized approach to wellness” or "Helping women feel their best."
Okay, but WHAT approach? What does “their best” feel like?
If you offer an online postpartum strength program, just say that. Then give us the details we'd need before considering it.
Can I do it at home? Do I need equipment? Is there someone I can ask questions or am I getting a login and learning at my own pace?
Those answers help a person decide whether your offer makes sense for her. They also put specific information about your business and offers on the page, where AI tools can access it.
This is where I start in my Booked from Search™ Method. We pull together the expertise and explanations already in your business to build your Authority Blueprint: what you should be known for, why your approach matters, and how to make that clear to someone who's just finding you.
Your existing content and client conversations give you a lot to work with. So before assigning yourself another afternoon of staring at a blank Google Doc, go look at what you've already said well.
You already know all of this because you live inside your business every day. The person who's had your website open for twelve seconds does not.
Write for the person who hasn't been following you since 2021.
Give your best answers somewhere to live.
"Will this work if I'm still on birth control?"
"How is this different from what I've already tried?"
Questions like these deserve more than a vague "everybody is different!" followed by a button to book a call. If someone needs a longer explanation to understand your answer, a blog post gives you room to provide one.
(Yes, this is me finding yet another opportunity to bully you into starting a blog!)
"Okay, but how do I turn one client question into a whole blog post?"
Great question, I would love to tell you!
A blog post should be more than a literal FAQ where you just answer the one exact question and move on with your day. Yes, answer the question directly. Just like Google, AI search LOVES a clear, concise answer it can reference. I always recommend using the first 1-2 paragraphs to answer the question and provide a clear summary that Google and AI tools can easily scan when crawling your website.
After that? This is the place to expand on your approach at a much deeper level than you can do in an Instagram caption. Your experience gives you something to add to those answers.
Explain what you consider when answering that question, how your approach applies, and where its limits are. Share a relevant client story that can help someone see what’s possible for them. Link to other blog posts, website pages, or a free opt-in when relevant.
Whatever you write about in your next post, please please please give yourself enough room to explain it. There's no official minimum word count for search, but I find 800 to 1,000 words is a good sweet spot for most blog posts.
That gives you space to answer the question, share an example, and point readers toward related pages or resources when they're useful. It's also room for the part that makes the post yours: why you approach the problem this way, what you've noticed in your work, and what you wish more people understood.
If you've said everything the reader needs in fewer words, leave it. Adding fluff for the sake of word count will work against you. But if you've just written 200 words that any practitioner could have written, there's probably more of YOU that needs to make it onto the page before you hit publish.
Let people see who's behind the advice.
Remember being taught in school to look for credible sources (aka absolutely NOT Wikipedia) when writing an essay?
Your readers deserve to know where the information is coming from, too. A cute blog theme and a mysterious username might have worked in your Tumblr days, but someone considering your health advice needs to know who's giving it.
We don’t want people wondering who the hell you are to be teaching them anything. Put your name on your posts, include a short bio with relevant qualifications, and link to an About page or Author bio page where someone can learn more about your experience.
If you've been interviewed or featured somewhere relevant, link to that too. Let people see the work you've done! Google and AI tools look for clear authorship and evidence of expertise, especially when it comes to health information.
Your credentials are that first trust signal that says, “Hey, I am actually educated and qualified to teach in this field.” And then your blog itself is a chance to show people how you think and basically give readers a sample of the expertise they’ll get inside your program.
Make sure your website copy is accessible.
That means your favorite cute Canva graphic needs a text version. I see website copy uploaded as an image All. The. Time. And I get it, it’s perfectly branded and you spent way more time than you care to admit getting the font and spacing just right… and now your website editor is being annoying about it.
But if your entire program description sits inside that graphic, the design is creating a problem. Words inside an image need a text alternative for people using screen readers (you can do this with alt text, but most people miss this step).
And besides that, it also can't be resized and adapted the same way actual website text can. Meaning, if someone opens up your website on their phone, they might not be able to read the text at all. (The stats say over 60% of traffic comes from cell phones and if most of your clients currently come from social media, it could be much higher for you).
So keep your main copy as text on the page. You can still have cute graphics, I promise.
There's a search reason for this too: Google recommends keeping important information in text form, where it can easily read that information as part of your page. Search tools can sometimes recognize words inside images, but I wouldn't make that the only way they can learn about your work. Put the explanation in a text box on your website so your offer details are right there to read, without anyone needing to decipher your Canva export.
When people start finding you, pay attention!
Getting mentioned by AI is exciting. But I'd still want to know whether anyone came to your website, what they read, and whether they took a step toward working with you.
You can look for AI referrals in your analytics. Common ones I see referring traffic to my clients are ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. I also recommend asking new clients how they found you and keeping track of what they say helped them decide to work with you.
If you notice a certain blog post is bringing a lot of traffic to your website, look at what it helps them understand and where they go from there. If they're still asking the same question before enrolling, you have a pretty good clue about what to add.
And if you're still at the "I should probably do something about my website" stage, start with the explanation you keep giving on calls. Give it a page you can send someone to. The next person who needs to hear it shouldn't have to wait until you're free to explain it again.
If you're reading this thinking, "I have so much of this in my head, but almost none of it on my website," that's where Booked from Search™ comes in. We take the expertise you've already built and shape it into searchable content that helps the right people find you and understand why they'd want to work with you, without needing you online for every conversation.
