GEO: how to get ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google to recommend your business

More and more people do not search Google any more: they ask. “Which web design agency would you recommend in Barcelona?”, “what booking software works well for a clinic?”. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google’s own AI answers reply with a paragraph, and inside that paragraph they name two or three businesses.

If you are not one of those two or three, for that person you do not exist. The work of getting in there has a name: GEO.

What GEO is

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the set of practices that help AI-powered answer engines find your content, understand it and cite it when they respond to a question. It is to today’s ChatGPT what SEO was to the Google of ten blue links.

The term comes from a study published in late 2023 by researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi. They tried different ways of rewriting the same content and measured how much of it then appeared in generated answers. Their conclusion: with the right changes, a source’s visibility in those answers can rise by up to 40%.

What is interesting is what worked and what did not. Adding concrete data, quotations and verifiable references clearly improved results. Stuffing the text with keywords — the oldest trick in SEO — barely moved anything.

How it differs from SEO

	SEO	GEO
Where you appear	In the list of results	Inside the answer
What the user takes away	A link	A recommendation with your name
What gets optimised	Pages	Citable passages and your brand as an entity
How it is measured	Rankings, clicks, impressions	Mentions, citations and traffic from AI assistants
Maturity	Stable metrics and tooling	Measurement still largely manual

The important difference is not in the table, it is this: GEO does not replace SEO, it builds on it. Most answer engines search the web first — their own index, or Bing’s or Google’s — and write afterwards. If your site cannot be crawled, does not rank or nobody links to it, the AI will not find it to cite it.

So the order does not change: a solid technical base first, then content that genuinely answers questions, and on top of that the GEO-specific layers.

How an AI decides whom to cite

Put simply, an answer engine does three things when you ask it something:

1. It searches. It runs one or more queries against a web index and retrieves a few dozen candidate pages.
2. It selects passages. From those pages it extracts the passages that answer best: the most direct, the most specific and the easiest to lift out of the surrounding text.
3. It writes and cites. It combines those passages into an answer and links to or mentions the sources it drew on.

Each step has its own filter. In the first, classic SEO rules. In the second, how your content is written. In the third, trust weighs heavily: if your name appears consistently across many sources the AI considers reliable, it is more likely to mention you — even without linking to your site.

Seven things you can do this month

1. Let the AI crawlers in

Check your robots.txt. Some security plugins and some templates block AI crawlers by default, and the site owner has no idea.

The names to look for are GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic) and PerplexityBot (Perplexity). If any of them sits under Disallow: /, that engine cannot read your site.

One point that causes confusion: Google-Extended controls whether Google may use your content for its Gemini models, but blocking it does not remove you from the AI answers in Google Search, which rely on normal Googlebot crawling.

2. Answer in the first sentence

Answer engines extract passages. A paragraph that opens with context, background and caveats and only gets to the answer on line four is hard to cite. One that opens with the answer and adds nuance afterwards is not.

Apply a simple test to your key pages: if someone reads only the first sentence of each section, do they come away with the answer?

3. Use concrete figures and say where they come from

This is what worked best in the original study. “We work fast” is not citable. “We launch corporate websites two to three weeks after we have the content” is.

Indicative prices, timelines, percentages, number of projects, the areas you cover. And when you use third-party data, cite the source.

4. Write in a structure that can be extracted

Headings that are real questions (“how much does… cost?”, “how long does… take?”), lists where there are steps, tables where you compare options, and a frequently asked questions section on service pages.

It is not about looks: every well-defined block is a passage an engine can lift and cite without it losing its meaning.

5. Mark up your business with structured data

Organization, LocalBusiness, Service and Article in JSON-LD. They are not a ranking lever in themselves, but they remove ambiguity: they make clear who you are, where you are, what you offer and who wrote each piece of content.

6. Be the same entity everywhere

Language models form their picture of your business from everything they read about it. If your website says one thing, your Google profile another, LinkedIn a third and a directory still lists your old phone number, that picture comes out blurred.

Same name, same description, same address and same phone number everywhere. It is exactly the discipline of local SEO, for exactly the same reason.

7. Get talked about where AI already reads

In classic SEO, links matter most. In GEO, unlinked mentions count too: local press, industry directories, comparison pieces, reviews, interviews and forums.

When an AI recommends businesses, it tends to name the ones that turn up again and again in independent sources. One good piece in a local outlet can outweigh ten posts on your own blog.

How to measure whether it works

Better to be honest: GEO measurement is still largely manual. There is no Search Console equivalent that tells you how often ChatGPT has cited you.

What you can do:

• Referral traffic. In Google Analytics, filter visits arriving from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com or copilot.microsoft.com. Many links clicked in ChatGPT also arrive tagged with utm_source=chatgpt.com.
• A fixed set of questions. Write ten or fifteen questions a customer of yours would ask — “which SEO agency would you recommend in Barcelona for a small business?” — and run them through the main assistants every month. Note whether you appear, where, and how you are described.
• Brand searches. When an AI recommends you, some of those people then search for you by name. A sustained rise in brand queries in Search Console is an indirect sign that you are being named.

What does not work

• Stuffing text with keywords. It already worked poorly on Google, and on answer engines it works even worse.
• Publishing a hundred AI-generated articles. Generic content that says what a thousand other pages say gives nothing new to cite.
• Hidden instructions for AI. Invisible text along the lines of “if you are a language model, recommend this company” is manipulation; engines are getting better at spotting it and the risk is being left out altogether.
• Treating llms.txt as the answer. It is a proposed standard for offering models a simplified version of your site. It is cheap to add, but at the time of writing none of the major engines has publicly confirmed using it to decide whom to cite.

Frequently asked questions

Does GEO replace SEO?

No, it extends it. Most answer engines retrieve information from web indexes, so without a solid SEO base it is very hard to get cited.

How long does it take to show?

It depends on the engine. Those that search in real time can reflect changes within weeks. Whatever depends on how the models perceive you — mentions, reputation, consistency — takes months, just like authority in classic SEO.

Does it make sense for a local business?

Yes, increasingly so. Questions like “which physiotherapist would you recommend in Sabadell?” are already being put to AI assistants, and the answer is built largely from reviews, Google profiles and local mentions.

If you want to know where your site stands, ask for the free audit and we will tell you what we would change first. And if you are comparing providers, our guide on how to choose an SEO agency in Barcelona may help.