What Is GEO? How to Get Recommended by ChatGPT and Gemini

More and more people ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude or Google’s AI Overviews for a recommendation instead of scrolling through a list of links: “a reliable web design agency in Barcelona”, “a kitchen equipment wholesaler in Madrid”. GEO, or generative engine optimization, is the work of making sure these assistants understand your business, trust it and mention it when it’s relevant. Here is how it works and what you can do today.

Key takeaway

GEO (generative engine optimization) means making your business easy for ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews to find, understand and trust: build on solid SEO, open each page with clear, verifiable facts and real FAQs, cite reliable sources, add structured data, keep your details consistent across the web and don’t block AI crawlers in robots.txt. Nobody can guarantee an AI recommendation; GEO raises the odds of being found, understood correctly and cited.

What GEO means

GEO is the set of practices that increase the chance that your business, your pages and your facts are used in answers written by generative engines, ideally with a link back to you. “Generative engines” are AI tools that write an answer instead of just returning links.

GEO is a young field. Outside the AI companies, nobody knows exactly how each system picks its sources, and the tools change often. This guide is based on how AI search services publicly describe their search features and on long-standing principles of clear, trustworthy web content.

How AI answers are put together

An AI assistant’s answer usually draws on two sources: what the model learned during training and what it retrieves from the web in real time.

1. What the model learned during training: a large snapshot of public text up to a certain date. If your business was rarely mentioned online, the model may know little or nothing about it.
2. What it retrieves from the web in real time. When an assistant searches, it sends queries to a search index, reads a handful of pages and writes an answer based on them. Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Gemini, Claude with web search and Google’s AI Overviews typically show the sources they used as links.

Real-time retrieval is where you have the most influence. To be cited, your page has to be found, be easy to read and contain a clear statement the assistant can rely on.

GEO and SEO: partners, not rivals

GEO doesn’t replace SEO; it builds on it. Many AI search features use a search index to find candidate pages, and Google’s AI Overviews are built on Google Search itself. Google’s documentation on AI features and your website states that SEO best practices still apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode: a page only needs to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, with no additional requirements. If your pages aren’t indexed or don’t rank at all, AI tools are less likely to see them; our Google SEO guide covers those foundations.

The difference between SEO and GEO is one of emphasis:

• SEO focuses on ranking a page for a query and earning the click.
• GEO focuses on being the source an AI chooses to quote, summarize or recommend, even when the user never clicks.

In practice, the same foundations serve both: a technically healthy site, useful content and a good reputation.

Write pages AI can understand and quote

The pages AI quotes most easily lead with a direct answer, state verifiable facts and are organized as questions and answers.

• Answer questions directly. Put the answer first, in one or two plain sentences, then explain. “We design and build multilingual websites for businesses in Spain” beats a vague slogan.
• State the key facts clearly. Who you are, where you’re based, which areas you serve, what you offer, which languages you work in and how to contact you. Keep these facts identical across the whole site.
• Cite sources and use specific numbers. The GEO paper by researchers from Princeton University and other institutions, published at KDD 2024, found that GEO methods can boost a source’s visibility in generative engine responses by up to 40%. The best-performing methods added citations from reliable sources, relevant quotations and statistics, while classic keyword stuffing performed poorly. Every number and quote you add must be real and attributed.
• Add FAQ sections with the questions your customers really ask, each with a short, self-contained answer.
• Use structured data. Schema.org markup such as Organization (or LocalBusiness), Service and FAQPage describes your business in a machine-readable way. Structured data guarantees nothing, but it removes ambiguity.
• Keep text in the HTML. Many crawlers don’t run JavaScript, so important content shouldn’t depend on it, and it should never exist only inside images or videos. How much control you have over this depends on your platform; see Wix vs WordPress vs a custom website.
• Cover your customers’ languages. People ask assistants in Spanish, English, Chinese, French and more, and the answer often draws on sources in the same language. Properly localized pages, connected with hreflang tags, give you a chance in each one.

Build a consistent footprint across the web

A consistent footprint means your business details are identical everywhere and that sites people trust mention you, because AI systems cross-check information. If your business name, address, phone number and services are written differently on your website, Google Business Profile, social media and directories, it’s harder for a model to be confident about you.

• Use the same name, address, phone number and description everywhere.
• Keep your profiles up to date on the platforms that matter in your sector: Google Business Profile, industry directories, marketplaces, LinkedIn.
• Earn mentions on sites that people and AI systems already trust: local press, trade associations, partners, suppliers and event organizers. One genuine mention on a respected site is worth more than many low-quality ones.
• Encourage honest customer reviews. Assistants often summarize what reviewers say.

Let AI crawlers in

Letting AI crawlers in means making sure robots.txt and your hosting don’t block the bots AI assistants use to read your pages.

• Check your robots.txt. AI companies use their own crawlers, for example GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic) and PerplexityBot (Perplexity). If robots.txt blocks them, those assistants may not be able to read your pages. OpenAI’s crawler documentation explains that OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT’s search features and that sites opted out of it will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, while GPTBot crawls content that may be used to train models; the two can be controlled separately. Google’s AI Overviews rely on the regular Googlebot.
• Check your hosting or CDN. Some providers offer settings, sometimes switched on by default, that block AI bots. Make sure yours match what you actually want.
• Consider an llms.txt file. llms.txt is a proposal published by Jeremy Howard in 2024, not an official standard: a Markdown file at the root of your site that summarizes your business and points AI tools to your most important pages. Support varies between assistants, and Google’s page on AI features and your website says you don’t need AI text files or special schema.org structured data to appear in AI Overviews. Treat llms.txt as a low-cost extra, not a priority.

How to check whether it’s working

You can check whether GEO is working in four ways: ask the assistants yourself, track AI referrals in GA4, watch Search Console and fix wrong information at the source.

• Ask the assistants yourself. Make a list of questions your customers would ask (“Chinese wholesaler of … in Madrid”, “who builds online stores in Spanish and Chinese”) and put them to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google, in each of your languages. Note whether you’re mentioned, what is said and which sources are cited. Answers vary with time, location and phrasing, so repeat the test regularly and look for trends rather than single results.
• Track AI referrals in GA4. Visits from AI assistants show up with sources such as chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, claude.ai or copilot.microsoft.com. Look at “Session source / medium” in the Traffic acquisition report, or create a custom channel group for AI assistants to follow them over time. Some AI visits arrive without referrer information and appear as direct traffic, so treat these numbers as a minimum.
• Watch Search Console. Clicks from Google’s AI features are reported together with regular Google Search traffic under the “Web” search type, so keep an eye on impressions and clicks for question-style queries.
• Fix wrong information at the source. If an assistant repeats something outdated about you, update your website and profiles first; correcting the original sources is the most reliable way to change what gets repeated.

FAQ

Is GEO different from SEO?

They overlap heavily. SEO aims to rank pages and earn clicks from search results; GEO aims to have your business mentioned and cited in AI-generated answers. Good SEO is the foundation of GEO, because most AI search features find pages through a search index.

Can I pay to be recommended by ChatGPT or Gemini?

You can’t buy a place in the organic answer. Some AI products display ads, but they are labeled separately. Organic recommendations come from being findable, clear and well regarded across the web.

Do I need an llms.txt file?

It’s optional. llms.txt is an emerging convention, not a standard, and it won’t make up for unclear pages or a site that blocks crawlers. If your key pages are well structured and accessible, adding one is a small, harmless extra.

UsualMatrix helps businesses worldwide become visible on Google and in AI assistants, working in Chinese, Spanish and English. See our SEO & GEO service or contact us to talk about your website.