How professors can show up in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google “who are the leading experts on [your field]?” and you’ll get a confident, readable answer, often with links. For many people, especially journalists and event organisers on a deadline, that answer is now the first step, not a Google results page.

You can’t control what an AI tool says. But you can control most of what it reads.

How AI assistants decide what to say about you

Most AI answers draw on two things:

1. What the model learned in training: a snapshot of the public web from some time ago.
2. What it finds when it searches live: Perplexity, ChatGPT’s search mode and Google’s AI Overviews look up pages in real time and summarise them, usually with citations.

In both cases, the tool is summarising what already exists. If the clearest page about you is a thin faculty profile from three years ago, that’s the version of you it will repeat. If there’s a current, well-structured page on your own domain, that page has a good chance of becoming the source.

1. Publish one clear page that says who you are

Your homepage should state, in plain sentences near the top:

• your full name and current title and institution;
• what you work on, in words a non-specialist would use;
• your books, if any, by title;
• what you’re available for: media commentary, speaking, advisory work.

AI tools lift sentences, not layouts. “Jane Doe is a professor of marketing at X University who studies how consumers use mobile devices” is quotable. A headline that just says “Welcome” is not.

2. Put the important things in text, not PDFs or images

A CV as a PDF, a book cover with the title only in the image, a talk listed only inside a video: all of these are hard or impossible for machines to read reliably. Put the essentials on the page as text. Keep the PDF CV as a download, not the only source.

3. Add structured data

Structured data (schema.org markup) is a small block of code that labels facts on the page: this is a Person, this is their job title, this is their employer, this is a Book they wrote, these are their other profiles. Search engines use it to understand pages, and it removes the guesswork for any tool that reads it.

The most useful types for academics are:

• Person, with name, job title, employer, photo and sameAs links to your other profiles;
• Book, for each book, with title, publisher, date and ISBN;
• Article or ScholarlyArticle for writing you publish on the site;
• FAQPage, for a questions-and-answers section.

4. Be consistent everywhere, and link it all together

AI tools, like search engines, need to be sure that the professor on your faculty page, the author on Amazon, the speaker on a conference site and the person on LinkedIn are the same person. Help them:

• use exactly the same name everywhere (decide once: with or without a middle initial);
• use the same photo and a consistent one-line description;
• link your website to your faculty page, Google Scholar, ORCID, LinkedIn and publisher page, and link each of those back to your website where the platform allows.

These links are what sameAs in your structured data points to. Together they tell machines “these are all one person”.

5. Answer the questions people actually ask

People ask AI tools questions: “Who has written about X?”, “Is there a good book on Y?”, “Who could speak about Z at our conference?”. Pages that answer those questions directly are the ones that get quoted.

That’s why an FAQ section, clear talk descriptions and a short summary of each book are worth writing. Lead with the answer, then give the detail.

6. Keep it current

Live AI search favours pages that are clearly up to date. Add new papers, talks and media appearances as they happen, and show dates. A “Recent” section that stops two years ago tells both people and machines that the page isn’t maintained.

7. Earn mentions elsewhere

AI tools weigh independent sources. Interviews, op-eds, podcast appearances and event pages that mention you by name and link to your site all strengthen the picture. When you’re quoted in the press, ask for your website to be linked, not just your university.

A quick check you can do today

Ask two or three AI assistants, “Who is [your full name]?” and “Who are experts on [your topic]?”. Note what’s missing or out of date, and which pages they cite. That list is your to-do list.

If you’d like a personal website built with all of this in place (plain-language copy, structured data, consistent profiles and regular updates), I’ll design and write two sections from your published work, free. Request your samples.