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Getting Found by AI: Making Your Content the Answer AI Reaches For

Getting Found by AI: Making Your Content the Answer AI Reaches For
$69USD

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About this course

A practical, self-paced course on making your official information the answer residents get when they ask an AI assistant about your community.

A resident opens their phone and asks an AI assistant a question: is the water safe, when does the office close, how do I apply for a permit. The assistant gives them one answer, stitched together from the sources it has decided to use. Too often those sources are someone else's: an old news story, a third-party site, a forum thread, or a page on your own website that should have been taken down last year.

This course is a practical introduction to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), grounded in the published research and in what Google, OpenAI and Perplexity themselves say about how their tools find sources. It covers how AI assistants choose what to quote and why that differs from search ranking, three writing moves that make a page easier to find an answer in and safer to quote, how to test what assistants are telling residents about you right now, and how to diagnose why an answer went wrong, including old pages and website settings that quietly keep AI tools out.

Most of the work is clear thinking and clear writing, not code. You'll finish with a ranked list of the pages that matter most, a repeatable checklist, a simple way to measure progress, and honest answers for the colleagues and leaders who ask whether any of this guarantees results. It doesn't, and the course says so.

Who This Course Is For:

  • Government communicators at any level of technical confidence
  • Anyone responsible for service, eligibility or emergency information on a public website
  • Solo and small communications teams with no budget for vendors
  • Communicators who want the official version to be the one residents receive

Read a sample from this course

One answer, not ten links

Picture a resident with a simple question. Is the park open today? Is the water safe to drink? How do I apply for a permit? A few years ago, they would have searched, scanned a list of links, and clicked through to your official page. Today a growing number of them ask an AI assistant instead, whether that's ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot, and the assistant gives them one answer. Just one.

That single answer is what the resident takes away. They may never see a list of links, never visit your website, never know your page exists. They hear one synthesized reply, and for most of them that reply is the official position, whether or not it came from you.

This is no longer fringe behavior. In a February 2026 survey, about half of U.S. adults (49%) said they use AI chatbots, up from a third in 2024, and 42% said they use them to search for information (Pew Research Center, 2026). A year earlier, 34% of adults had used ChatGPT alone, roughly double the 2023 share (Pew Research Center, 2025).

The shift is happening inside ordinary search too. When Pew tracked the real browsing of U.S. adults in March 2025, about one in five Google searches produced an AI summary at the top. People who saw one clicked through to a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% for people who didn't, and they clicked a link inside the summary itself in just 1% of visits (Pew Research Center, 2025).

So residents are already doing this, today, whether or not your organization has a plan for it. The question is no longer whether they use AI to find public information. It's whether your information is what it hands them.

Keep reading — this course continues with 3 more lessons and 31 more sections.

What you'll learn

Explain in plain terms how AI assistants choose which sources to quote, and why that differs from ranking in search results.
Describe the real risk to residents when AI tools fill gaps in official information with outdated or secondhand sources, using documented cases.
Apply three writing moves (answer first, structure for extraction, and specific, sourced facts) to rebuild a service page.
Test what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews tell residents about your services, and record a baseline.
Diagnose why an AI answer went wrong, whether the cause is a missing answer, a buried answer, an outdated page or a crawler access setting.
Prioritize pages by impact and frequency so your effort goes where a wrong answer costs residents most.
4 lessons
Self-paced
Certificate of completion
Lifetime access

Course Curriculum

Full access upon enrollment
  1. 1.One answer, not ten links
  2. 2.Ranking and citing are different jobs
  3. 3.What fills the gap when you're not there
  4. 4.The answers are often wrong, and confidently so
  5. 5.Government content starts with an advantage
  6. 6.Try this: ask the assistants about yourself
  7. 7.This is a communications job
  8. 8.Sources & further reading
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