Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the work of getting AI answer engines to find your business, understand it correctly, and mention it when people ask for a recommendation. The engines in question are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews.
It sits next to SEO rather than replacing it. A classic search result is a list of links; an AI answer is a few sentences that name a handful of options. If you are not among them, there is no second page to scroll to.
How AI engines decide what to say
An AI answer comes from one of two places, and often both:
- Memory. What the model learned in training. It reflects how often, and how consistently, your business is described across the web.
- Live search. Pages the engine fetches while answering. ChatGPT search uses OpenAI’s own crawler and Bing; Gemini and AI Overviews use Google’s index; Perplexity runs its own crawler.
Memory changes slowly. Live search changes as soon as your pages do, which is why most practical GEO work starts there.
The four things GEO covers
- Access. The crawlers that feed AI answers must be allowed to read your site. That means robots.txt rules and any firewall setting that blocks bots. Blocking training crawlers such as GPTBot is a separate choice and does not hide you from AI search.
- Readability. Most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. If your content only appears after scripts run, the crawler receives an empty page.
- Identity. Engines need to be sure who you are: your name, what you do, where, and for whom. Structured data such as Organization or LocalBusiness, and the same name and details everywhere, make that unambiguous.
- Answers. AI engines quote pages that answer questions directly. A clear question as a heading with a one or two sentence answer below it is easy to cite. A page of slogans is not.
Where to start
- Check which AI crawlers can reach your site with the free AI crawler checker.
- Add Organization or LocalBusiness markup to your homepage. The schema checker shows what is there now.
- Write one plain sentence near the top of your homepage that says what you are, for whom and where.
- Ask an engine about your category and see who it names. The Does ChatGPT recommend you? tool does that in one step.
What about llms.txt?
llms.txt is a proposed file that lists your key pages for language models. It is quick to add and harmless, but major engines rarely read it today, so it belongs at the end of the list, not the start.
Measuring GEO
AI answers vary by phrasing, place and day, so one question is a sample, not a verdict. Useful measurement asks several engines the same questions in several ways, separates answers from memory and from live search, and tracks the trend week to week. That is what AI Search Analyzer’s AI visibility does.