Generative Engine Optimization for Businesses

Many people now ask ChatGPT too, not just Google. This guide explains how a website shows up in those answers, what that costs and where it makes sense to start.

What GEO means

A search engine shows ten links. An AI assistant writes a finished answer and names a few sources. GEO makes sure your website is one of those sources.

For businesses, that changes the competition. A third-place spot in the results used to still bring in visitors. An AI answer, on the other hand, usually names only a few businesses, and everyone else isn’t mentioned at all.

The term comes from a study by computer scientists led by Pranjal Aggarwal, which they presented in 2024 at a major data science conference.2 You’ll also run into other names for the same thing.

8% vs. 15%Share of Google searches that led to a click on a regular result with an AI summary on the page, and without one.1

  • GEOGenerative Engine OptimizationOptimizing for AI answers in general, the most common umbrella term.
  • AEOAnswer Engine OptimizationContent that answers a specific question directly and completely.
  • LLMOLarge Language Model OptimizationOptimizing for language models such as GPT, Claude or Gemini.

GEO vs. SEO: the difference

GEO builds on SEO, the classic kind of search engine optimization. That’s because a site that search engines struggle to read is just as hard for AI search to read.

What’s new is the goal, a mention in the answer instead of a spot in the list.

SEOGEO
Goala spot in the results lista mention in the answer
Successclicks on the resultmention, citation, click from the source link
Starting pointa keyworda full question
Strongest leverstechnical setup, content, linksevidence, clear answers, mentions on other sites

An old SEO trick won’t help you here. In the GEO study, repeating keywords as often as possible barely did anything. On Perplexity, text written that way even did 10 percent worse than the unchanged original.2

How AI search picks its sources

  1. The question

    Someone asks the assistant for a provider, a solution or a comparison. The assistant often splits the question into several searches.

  2. The retrieval

    A crawler, which is a program that reads websites, such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, fetches matching pages. It does not fetch what robots.txt blocks for it.3

  3. The answer

    The language model writes the answer from the pages it retrieved and names some of them as sources. Pages with a clear answer and evidence have the edge.2

Google has one special case. A setting called Google-Extended controls whether Google may use your content for its AI, Gemini, for example for training. According to Google, it has no effect on Google Search itself.4

Can AI read your site?

Enter your website. We’ll check whether the programs of eight AI services are allowed to read it, which is set in a file called robots.txt. We also look for an llms.txt, a kind of table of contents for AI.

Free, no sign-up · usually 5 to 20 seconds

Your result appears here: which crawlers may read your site and whether an llms.txt exists.

GEO best practices: what to do

Content

Answer questions, show evidence

  • Every important page answers the questions customers would ask an assistant, right at the top.
  • Numbers, sources and quotes belong in the text. In the GEO study, adding numbers, sources or quotes made pages 30 to 40 percent more visible in AI answers, each method on its own. Text that was simply rewritten to be easier to understand still gained 15 to 30 percent.2
  • Subheadings can be questions, paragraphs stay short, and anything that’s really a list is shown as one.
  • Your offer, region and audience are stated plainly on the page.
  • ExampleWe are your trusted partner for tailored solutions.We design and install conference rooms for 6 to 40 people in Chicago and the suburbs, since 2009.An assistant can use the second sentence as is, because it says who offers what to whom and where, and it even includes numbers.
Technical

Make your site readable

  • The robots.txt is a small file that controls which programs may read a website. Yours should allow the reading programs OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. These three bring pages into the answers of ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Google’s AI Overviews use the regular Googlebot instead.3
  • The programs GPTBot and ClaudeBot, on the other hand, collect content to train future AI models. You can allow or block them separately.3
  • robots.txt, excerpt
    User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: Claude-SearchBot
Allow: /

User-agent: PerplexityBot
Allow: /
  • Your hosting provider or a security service can also lock out AI programs without anything showing in your robots.txt. The widely used service Cloudflare, for example, has done that by default for newly added domains since July 1, 2025.7 The check above can’t see a block like that, because it sits in the settings of that service.
  • Key statements appear as text on the page, not only in images or PDFs.
  • Hidden extra details in your code, called structured data, tell machines exactly who your business is, where it’s located and what it offers.
  • An llms.txt sums up your most important pages for AI assistants. It’s only a proposal from 2024, though, and not an official standard.5 Create a draft
Mentions

Show up on other sites

  • AI answers draw on several sources. The more often a business is mentioned elsewhere, for example in industry directories, trade articles or review sites, the more sources the assistant finds that confirm it.
  • Name, address and offer are the same everywhere, on your own site and in your Google Business Profile.

Where to start

  1. Check access

    robots.txt and llms.txt with the check above, plus a look at your hosting and firewall settings.

  2. Collect questions

    Ten questions customers ask before they buy. Ask them in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google and note who gets named.

  3. Rework pages

    The pages for your main services first. Answer at the top, numbers and evidence below, one page per service.

  4. Tidy your data

    Add structured data and make your name, address and offer match on every profile.

  5. Measure again

    After three months, ask the same ten questions again and compare with your first log.

Test questions to adapt

  • Which [service] provider in [city] do you recommend?
  • How much does [service] cost?
  • What should I look for in a [service] provider?
  • What are the alternatives to [your product]?
  • How is [your company] different from [competitor]?

What GEO costs

That runs from a bit of your own time to several thousand dollars a month.

Do it yourself

Your time

The check above and the test questions cost nothing. Whoever already maintains your website can rework the pages.

First analysis

$9.99

The AI Quick Check from siteways.ai checks whether your site fits its customers and how easily it can be found on Google and in AI assistants. It also names the three changes that matter most. You pay once and get the PDF within minutes.

A one-time AI visibility audit from an agency starts at around $500. Bigger projects run $5,000 and up.6

Ongoing work

from $29 a month

Tools that check AI answers regularly start at $29 a month, and Semrush’s AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99 a month. If an agency takes care of it, small businesses pay $1,500 to $5,000 a month.6

How to measure success

  • Test questions

    Ask the same ten questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google every month. A simple log is enough for this. Write down the date, the question and the assistant. Then note whether your business was named and in which sentence. And jot down which competitors came up.

  • Visits from AI assistants

    In your analytics, visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai or copilot.microsoft.com show up as referrals.

  • Search Console

    Clicks and impressions of the pages you reworked, before and after.

  • Patience

    Expect months, not weeks. AI answers change with every model update, so measure over time.

Common mistakes

  1. Blocking AI crawlers without knowing it

    Through an old robots.txt template or a security service that turns bots away across the board.

  2. Repeating keywords

    Barely helped in the GEO study, and on Perplexity it did worse than before.2

  3. Sales talk instead of facts

    Making text sound more persuasive or authoritative brought no measurable gain in the study.2 Numbers and sources did.

  4. Key facts only in PDFs or images

    Prices, services and case studies belong on a page as text.

  5. One page for everything

    Services without their own page give no question a fitting answer.

  6. Set it and forget it

    AI answers change. Without measuring again, you never know what worked.

Know now what your website needs.

Our AI Quick Check reviews your website and tells you what to fix first. Built by web and SEO experts, in your inbox within minutes.

  • Audience analysis
  • Market analysis
  • Content analysis
  • UX analysis
  • SEO
  • AI search
  • Action plan

$9.99 one-time payment · no subscription, no account

PDF by email, usually in under 5 minutes

First page of a sample report with the headline what the website needs now and three steps in order

GEO questions

What is generative engine optimization?

GEO covers everything that makes a website a source for AI answers. That means the answers of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, as well as Google’s AI Overviews.

How does generative engine optimization work?

When an AI assistant answers a question, it often searches the web first, picks a handful of pages and writes its answer from them. GEO makes sure your pages are among the ones it can read and wants to quote. That means its crawlers are allowed in, and the answer to a customer’s question sits on the page as plain text, backed by numbers and sources.

How is GEO different from traditional SEO?

SEO aims for a good spot in the results list. GEO, on the other hand, aims for a mention in the answer itself. It builds on SEO, but relies more on evidence, clear answers and mentions on other sites.

My website ranks well on Google. Do I still need GEO?

Good rankings help, because AI search draws on the same pages. But to get mentioned in the answers, evidence and clear answers count as well. Ten test questions in ChatGPT will show you within minutes where you stand.

What is Google’s AI Mode?

A search mode in Google that responds with an AI-written answer and sources instead of a list of links. The same rules apply there too. It takes clear answers and evidence, and the site has to be readable for the AI programs.

How much does GEO cost?

Doing it yourself only costs time. A first analysis starts at $9.99. And if an agency takes it on, small businesses pay $1,500 to $5,000 a month.

Which tools help with GEO?

Three kinds are useful. A crawler check like the free one on this page shows whether AI services may read your site at all. Your web analytics shows the visits that arrive from chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai. And prompt tracking tools put your test questions to AI assistants on a schedule and record whether your company gets named, which SISTRIX, for example, offers as part of its toolbox.

Do I need an llms.txt?

The llms.txt is only a proposal from 2024 and not an official standard. It does no harm, though, and it’s quick to set up. The file AI programs actually follow is the robots.txt.

Can anyone guarantee a mention in ChatGPT?

No. The answers are generated fresh for every question, and no agency or tool controls them directly. Good content, evidence and mentions on other sites do raise your odds, though.

Sources

  1. Pew Research Center, browsing data of 900 US adults, March 2025, published July 22, 2025: pewresearch.org
  2. Aggarwal et al.: GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024: arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
  3. Crawler documentation: OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity
  4. Google, overview of common crawlers: developers.google.com
  5. Jeremy Howard: The /llms.txt file, September 3, 2024: llmstxt.org
  6. Prices: eseospace.com (price check October 13, 2026: one-time AI visibility audit $497, Otterly.AI Lite $29 a month, Semrush AI Visibility Toolkit $99 a month), nutshell.com (updated September 28, 2026: small business $1,500 to $5,000 a month, projects $5,000 to $50,000)
  7. Cloudflare blog, July 1, 2025: blog.cloudflare.com