When a Business Central customer outgrows their ERP, or a CFO starts researching multi-entity consolidation, the first stop is increasingly not Google. It is ChatGPT, Perplexity, or the AI Overview sitting on top of the search results. If those engines do not cite you, you are not in the deal. Most advice on this topic stays strategic and vague. This guide is the opposite: how each engine sources content, what formatting actually earns citations, and how to prove it worked.
Your buyers already ask AI first
The research phase of a Dynamics 365 or ISV purchase has moved upstream. Buyers ask AI engines to compare solutions, explain categories, and shortlist vendors before they ever land on a website. By the time someone fills out your form, an AI engine has already framed the category for them and named the players it considers credible.
That framing is winnable. AI engines cite a surprisingly small set of sources per query, and in niche categories like the Microsoft channel, the bar to become one of those sources is lower than in broad horizontal software. The partners who move first will own the answers for years, because engines keep citing what they already trust.
How ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google differ
Treating "AI search" as one channel is the most common mistake. The three engines source content in genuinely different ways, and your tactics should reflect that.
ChatGPT answers from two places: its training data and live web browsing built on Bing's index. For non-browsing answers, what matters is whether your brand and category associations exist broadly across the web, in third-party publications, directories, and community content. For browsing answers, it favors pages that are well structured, load cleanly, and answer the question near the top.
Perplexity is retrieval-first and cites sources on every answer. It rewards freshness, direct answers, and pages built to resolve one query completely. A tightly scoped page that answers "what is multi-entity management for Business Central" will outperform a sprawling 4,000-word pillar that buries the answer in section six.
Google AI Overviews lean heavily on Google's existing ranking signals. If you already rank on page one for a query, you are a candidate for the Overview. Structured data, snippet-worthy passages, and clear heading hierarchy decide whether Google can lift your content into the answer box.
Formatting tactics that earn citations
Across all three engines, the same structural patterns keep showing up in cited content:
- Answer-first sections. Open every H2 with a 40 to 80 word paragraph that directly answers the heading. Engines extract these blocks almost verbatim.
- FAQ blocks with FAQPage schema. Real buyer questions, phrased the way buyers phrase them, each with a self-contained answer. This is the single highest-leverage format for AI Overviews.
- Structured data everywhere. Organization, Article, and FAQPage schema at minimum. Engines use it to confirm who you are and what the page is about.
- Quotable statistics with a source. A specific number with attribution gets cited far more than a general claim. "Partners using intent data cut prospecting time by a third" is quotable. "Intent data saves time" is not.
- Comparison and definitional pages. These are the page types LLMs cite most in B2B software. If you sell against a category leader, the comparison page is not optional.
Entity naming and quotable phrasing
AI engines think in entities, not keywords. That means naming discipline matters more than keyword density ever did. Use your full company name, your product name, and your category label consistently and together, on your site and everywhere else you appear. If your ISV solution is "multi-entity management for Business Central," that exact phrase should appear wherever your product does, so engines learn the association.
Then write sentences an engine can lift without context. Declarative, self-contained, no pronouns doing heavy lifting. "Acme Software's consolidation module closes multi-entity books in Business Central without manual journal entries" survives extraction. "It also helps with that" does not.
Third-party presence compounds all of this. Engines trust entities they see confirmed across multiple domains. In the Microsoft channel, publications like ERP Software Blog punch far above their visual weight here. The site looks plain, but AI engines cite it constantly, and a byline there does more for your entity footprint than another post on your own blog.
Measuring AI citation success
Most partners never measure this, which is why most AI visibility work dies in month two. A simple three-layer framework fixes that:
- Presence. Build a fixed set of 20 to 40 queries your buyers actually ask, run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google monthly, and record whether you are mentioned or cited. Same queries, same cadence, so the trendline means something.
- Share. For each query, note who else gets cited. Your goal is not just to appear, it is to displace whoever the engines currently treat as the category authority.
- Impact. Track referral traffic from AI surfaces in GA, branded search lift, and the number of inbound conversations where a prospect says they found you through ChatGPT. That last one shows up faster than you would expect.
One caution: be skeptical of anyone selling exact prompt volumes or precise AI query data. The model makers do not release it, so those numbers are estimates dressed up as measurement. A disciplined query set you control beats a dashboard of guesses.
Where Microsoft partners win first
The fastest wins in this channel are definitional content for your product category, comparison pages against the alternatives buyers name in discovery calls, and FAQ content built from real sales conversations. Pair that with a consistent entity footprint across AppSource, partner directories, and channel publications, and you become the source engines reach for when your category comes up.
This is the work behind our Managed AI Visibility program: pillar content built to get cited, off-site and directory optimization, and a measurement dashboard tied to your analytics, so you can see the citations and the pipeline they produce. If your buyers are asking AI about your category and someone else's name comes back, talk to us.
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