Short answer: GEO (generative engine optimisation) is the work of making your business easy for AI tools — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Overviews — to understand, trust and cite. It builds on SEO: clear facts about your business, pages that answer questions directly, structured data, consistent profiles across the web and content worth quoting.
Key takeaways
- AI answers are built from web pages; if your pages are hard to understand, you won't be cited.
- Lead every important section with a short, direct answer, then explain.
- State plain facts about your business — who you are, where, since when, what you offer.
- Use FAQ and organisation schema, an
llms.txtfile and consistent profiles on other sites.- GEO doesn't replace SEO; it's what good SEO looks like in an AI-search world.
Search is changing. When someone asks "best digital marketing agency in Jaipur" or "how much does a business website cost in India", they increasingly get an answer written by AI — in Google's AI Overview at the top of the results, in ChatGPT, or in Perplexity — with a handful of sources cited. Being one of those sources is the new version of ranking on page one.
What is the difference between SEO, AEO and GEO?
| Term | Stands for | Goal |
|---|---|---|
| SEO | Search engine optimisation | Rank in Google's and Bing's search results |
| AEO | Answer engine optimisation | Be the direct answer: featured snippets, voice assistants, "People also ask" |
| GEO | Generative engine optimisation | Be cited in AI-written answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews |
In practice the three overlap heavily. The same things help all of them: clear pages, correct technical set-up, trustworthy content and consistent information about your business.
How do AI tools decide what to cite?
AI search tools find pages through search indexes and their own crawlers, then pick passages that answer the question clearly and come from sources that seem trustworthy. While no company publishes the full recipe, a few patterns are consistent:
- Clear, extractable answers. A short paragraph that answers the question directly is easier to quote than an answer spread over a long story.
- Specific facts. Pages that state concrete facts — prices "from ₹X", timelines, locations, steps — are more useful than vague marketing copy.
- Consistency. If your website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn page and directory listings all say the same thing about you, AI tools can be confident about who you are.
- Crawlability. If AI crawlers are blocked in robots.txt, or content only appears after JavaScript runs, your pages may never be read.
How to optimise your website for AI search: 8 steps
1. Allow the right crawlers
Check your robots.txt. Search-and-answer crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), PerplexityBot and Claude's crawlers need access if you want to appear in their answers. Training crawlers can be allowed or blocked separately, depending on your preference.
2. Lead with the answer
On service pages, articles and FAQs, put a 40–60 word direct answer at the top of each section, then expand. This is the single most useful change for both AEO and GEO.
3. Use question-style headings
Write headings the way people ask: "How much does SEO cost?", "How long does a website take?". They match how people query AI tools and make your sections easy to lift as answers.
4. State your business facts plainly
Somewhere on your site — usually the About page — say in simple sentences what your business is, where it is based, when it was founded, who founded it, what it offers and who it serves. AI tools rely on these facts to describe you accurately.
5. Add structured data
Organisation (or LocalBusiness) schema with your name, logo, address, phone and social profiles; Service schema on service pages; FAQPage schema where FAQs are visible on the page; Article schema with a named author on blog posts. Structured data removes ambiguity.
6. Publish an llms.txt file
An llms.txt file at the root of your website is a plain-text summary of your business and key pages, written for AI tools. It's a new, informal convention — not a ranking factor anyone has confirmed — but it costs little and gives AI tools a clean overview.
7. Show real expertise
Named authors with a short bio, real examples from your work, original explanations and dates showing when content was last updated all help AI tools (and people) trust a page.
8. Be mentioned elsewhere
AI answers often draw on third-party sources: directories, reviews, industry articles, forums and social profiles. A complete Google Business Profile, listings on relevant directories and genuine participation in communities where your customers ask questions all increase the chances of being mentioned.
How do you measure GEO?
There is no Search Console for ChatGPT yet. Practical ways to track progress:
- Each month, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google (with AI Overviews) the questions your customers ask, and note whether you're mentioned or linked.
- Watch referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar domains in Google Analytics 4.
- Track branded searches in Search Console — people often search your name after seeing it in an AI answer.
- Keep a simple spreadsheet so you can see trends over time.
Common mistakes
- Blocking AI crawlers by accident with a security plugin or an overly strict robots.txt.
- Hiding key content in images, PDFs or JavaScript-only widgets.
- Inconsistent business details — different names, phone numbers or addresses on different sites.
- Writing only for keywords, with long introductions before the actual answer.
What to do next
Start with the basics: check robots.txt, add direct answers to your most important pages and make sure your business facts are consistent everywhere. If you'd like help, our SEO service covers AEO and GEO alongside classic SEO, and our SEO company in Jaipur page explains how we work with local businesses.
