How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT and Google's AI.

Why GEO matters now

Google says AI Overviews now has more than 2.5 billion monthly users, and AI Mode passed 1 billion in its first year. When an AI summary appears, people click through less: Pew Research Center found that users clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits with an AI summary, against 15% without one.

The answer is becoming the first thing buyers read. If your business is not in it, you are starting from behind, however well your website ranks further down.

How AI engines choose sources

We trace AI answers with our own tools, and four patterns hold across engines:

• They search before they answer. Most engines run their own web searches, often several rewrites of the question, and build the answer from what they find. Ranking for those searches is the entry ticket.
• They trust third parties. Directories, review platforms, comparison lists and publications that mention you carry more weight than your own website's claims.
• They quote clear pages. A sentence that answers the question directly, with a fact or number and a source, is far more likely to be lifted than a paragraph of marketing.
• They can only use what they can read. Most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, and some sites block AI crawlers without knowing it.

Research supports the content side: the original GEO study from Princeton and partners found that adding quotations, statistics and cited sources to a page raised its visibility in generative answers by up to about 40%.

GEO, AEO and SEO

In practice they overlap heavily. GEO without SEO rarely works, because the engines lean on search results to decide what to read.

A GEO checklist

1. List the questions your buyers ask AI engines, in their words: "best", "who", "which", "how much", plus your service and area.
2. Run them in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Mode, and record who is named and which sources are cited.
3. Rank for the searches behind those answers with strong service and comparison pages.
4. Get listed, reviewed and mentioned on the sources the answers cite.
5. Put the answer first on your key pages, with facts, prices and sources.
6. Keep your business facts identical everywhere: name, services, areas, contact details.
7. Check that AI search crawlers can reach your pages, in robots.txt and in your CDN's bot settings.
8. Re-run the prompts monthly and track the share that names you.

How to measure GEO

Keep a fixed bank of buyer prompts and run it on a schedule across engines. For each answer, record whether you are named, whether you are cited with a link, who is named instead, and which sources are cited. The share of prompts that name you, tracked over months, is the number that matters. It is exactly what our AI search service reports.

What does not work

• llms.txt files as a ranking trick. They are a proposal, not a standard, and Google has said it does not use them. Harmless, but not how you get cited.
• Schema markup alone. Structured data helps search engines understand your business, but on its own it is not what gets you named.
• Stuffing pages with questions. Engines quote clear answers, not pages built to catch every phrasing.
• Buying mentions on spam sites. AI engines, like search engines, lean on sources people actually trust.