What Is GEO? Getting Your Business Recommended by AI

More and more people don’t search — they ask. “What’s a good web design company?” goes to ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, and the AI answers with a shortlist. If your business isn’t on that list, you’re invisible to a fast-growing slice of buyers. GEO is how you get on it.

What is GEO?

GEO — generative engine optimisation — is the practice of getting your business understood, trusted and cited by AI assistants when people ask them questions. Where SEO is about ranking on Google, GEO is about being the answer (or one of the answers) an AI gives directly.

Why it matters now

A large and rising share of research — including buying research — now happens in AI chat. Those tools don’t show ten blue links; they give a confident answer that mentions a handful of options. Being one of those options is quickly becoming as important as ranking on Google, and far fewer businesses are optimised for it — so the opportunity is wide open.

How AI assistants decide what to recommend

AI answers aren’t magic — they’re built on what the models can crawl, retrieve and trust. In practice, that means:

• Can they crawl you? AI crawlers must be allowed to read your site.
• Do they understand you? Clear, factual, well-structured content and structured data spell out who you are and what you do.
• Are you in their index? Many AI tools draw on Bing and live web search — so being indexed there matters.
• Do others corroborate it? Consistent information across the web (and mentions on reputable sites) builds the trust that gets you cited.

How to optimise for GEO

1. Let AI crawlers in

Make sure your robots.txt allows the AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended and others) rather than blocking them. If they can’t read you, they can’t recommend you.

2. Add structured data

Schema (JSON-LD) tells AI exactly what your pages are — your organisation, services, prices, FAQs. It removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is what stops an AI from confidently citing you.

3. Write clear, factual, answer-shaped content

AI favours content that directly answers real questions in plain language — service pages that state what you do and for whom, and articles that answer the questions buyers actually ask. Vague marketing copy gives an AI nothing to quote.

4. Publish an llms.txt

An llms.txt file is an emerging convention: a concise, curated summary of your business (what you do, services, contact) written for AI assistants to read. It’s a simple, direct way to tell AI how to describe and recommend you.

5. Be present in Bing

Several major AI assistants and copilots are powered by Bing’s index. Being verified and indexed in Bing Webmaster Tools — not just Google — is one of the most direct levers for showing up in AI answers.

6. Build a consistent, corroborated presence

Keep your name, description and details consistent across your site, profiles and listings, and earn mentions on reputable sites. Consistency and corroboration are how an AI moves from “maybe” to “confidently recommends.”

GEO and SEO work together

GEO isn’t a replacement for SEO — it’s the next layer. The same foundations (crawlable, fast, structured, well-written) serve both, and a business that’s strong on Google and Bing is far more likely to be the one an AI names. Do the SEO and GEO work together and you cover search and AI.

Common questions

Can you guarantee my business appears in ChatGPT?

No — and be sceptical of anyone who promises it. AI outputs aren’t directly controllable. What you can do is make your business maximally crawlable, understandable, indexed and corroborated, which is what gives you the best chance of being cited.

Does this only help with AI?

No — nearly everything that helps GEO also helps traditional SEO and your human visitors. It’s good hygiene that happens to pay off in three places at once.

Want to be the business AI recommends?

We do exactly this — for our own site and for clients: crawlable, structured, indexed and citable across Google, Bing and AI. It pairs naturally with building AI assistants of your own. Tell us about your business and we’ll put together a SEO & GEO plan to get you found — and recommended.