A little while ago one of my clients asked me to make sure their new site would show up “when people ask the AI,” not just on Google. Nobody had put them up to it. They’d noticed that they, and the people around them, had started asking ChatGPT the kind of questions they used to type into a search bar, and they wanted to be in those answers.
That request has a name now. It’s called GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization.
GEO is the work of getting your business named when someone asks an AI assistant, ChatGPT, Google’s AI answers, Perplexity, or Claude, for a recommendation. Regular SEO is about ranking on a page of blue links. GEO is about being the name that comes back when there’s no page of links at all, just a short answer and, if you’re lucky, you in it.
I want to be honest about where this actually stands, because there’s a lot of noise around it right now. Nobody fully knows how these systems decide who to mention, and anyone promising you a guaranteed spot in an AI answer is selling you something. The models are mostly a black box and they change often. But a handful of things do seem to help, pretty consistently, and most of them are things a careful web person was already doing. GEO is really just traditional SEO done more carefully, with a couple of new pieces bolted on.
Here’s what seems to matter, as far as anyone can tell right now.
First, the assistant has to be able to work out what you actually are. That comes down to structured data, the behind-the-scenes labels that tell a machine “this is a landscaping company in Newmarket, it serves these towns, and here’s the phone number.” A site that looks right to a person but says nothing a machine can read cleanly is close to invisible to the part of the web that feeds these answers.
Your details also need to agree with each other everywhere they show up. If your name, address, and phone number read one way on your site, a slightly different way on your Google profile, and a third way on some old directory nobody’s touched since 2015, the assistant has less reason to trust any single version. It’s boring, and it matters more than it probably should.
The writing on your pages does a lot of the work too. These tools lift short, clear, factual passages, so a page that plainly says “here’s what a website care plan covers” is far easier to quote back than a page written like a glossy brochure. That, more or less, is why this post reads the way it does.
There’s also a small new piece worth knowing about, called llms.txt. It’s a plain text file that tells AI tools, in one place, what your business is and which pages actually matter. Almost no local shop has written one yet. It’s early and adoption is uneven, so I wouldn’t oversell it, but it’s cheap and honest and there’s no real cost to being early on something like this.
The reason I’m writing this now instead of a year from now is that the behavior is already here. I’m watching business owners, including a client of mine, start asking about it on their own, without anyone selling them on it first. When someone tells me they want their site to show up “when people ask the AI,” the demand has pretty clearly arrived ahead of most of the local market.
So, no magic, and no guarantees from me either. What I can say plainly is that the sites most likely to get named are the ones that are built cleanly and labeled so a machine can actually read them, and that are written like a real person answering a real question. If your current site can’t do that yet, that’s worth fixing, and honestly it’s most of what I do all day.
If you want a straight read on where your site stands, send it over and I’ll tell you. Free, and you keep the answer either way.