SEO · 22 October 2026 · 6 min read
GEO: how to make your business visible in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI answers
More people ask AI assistants instead of typing keywords into Google. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is about making your business easy for those systems to read, trust and cite.
What AI assistants actually read
Assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews answer from pages they can crawl and from what other sites say about you. If your site renders as an empty JavaScript shell, or blocks their crawlers, you are invisible to them.
Make your site readable
The technical basics of classic SEO matter even more for AI:
- Server-rendered HTML instead of client-only JavaScript
- A clear title, description and heading structure on every page
- A sitemap.xml and a robots.txt that allows the crawlers you want
- Fast pages that work on mobile
Describe your business in structured data
Schema.org markup tells machines who you are: Organization with location and languages, Service, CreativeWork for case studies, Article for blog posts and FAQPage for questions and answers. It removes guesswork when an assistant summarises your company.
Write answers, not slogans
AI systems quote passages that answer a question directly. Pages with concrete facts, steps, comparisons and short FAQs get cited; pages full of "innovative solutions" do not.
Case studies are especially valuable: a specific problem, what was built and the result is exactly the kind of evidence an assistant can reference.
Add an llms.txt file
llms.txt is a short Markdown file at the root of your site that summarises who you are and links to your most important pages. It is a young convention, but it is cheap to add and gives language models a clean entry point.
Be mentioned elsewhere
Assistants trust what several independent sources agree on. Directory listings, partner pages, reviews and articles that mention your company and services strengthen how confidently an AI recommends you.
FAQ
- What is GEO?
- Generative engine optimisation is the practice of making a website easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews to crawl, understand and cite, using readable HTML, structured data, factual content and external mentions.
- Is GEO different from SEO?
- It builds on SEO. The same technical foundations apply, with more weight on clear factual answers, structured data, allowing AI crawlers and being mentioned by other trusted sources.
- Should I allow AI crawlers like GPTBot?
- If you want to appear in AI answers, yes. Blocking them in robots.txt keeps your content out of those assistants.