AI search
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making a website's facts easy for AI answer engines to retrieve, understand, and cite. It combines technical crawl access, structured data, clear answer-first writing, and consistent entity information. Unlike traditional SEO, which competes for a link position, GEO competes to be included in a generated answer.
SEO optimises for a ranked list of URLs. GEO optimises for a synthesized paragraph that may mention three sources and omit the rest. The unit of competition changes: instead of a position, you are competing to be the source a model selects, quotes, and links.
The fundamentals still matter. A page that cannot be crawled, loads slowly, or buries its meaning in vague copy will struggle in both channels. GEO adds a stronger emphasis on entity clarity, direct answers, and machine-readable facts.
Start with access: allow the crawlers you want to be cited by, and publish an llms.txt summary. Then make the page legible: one clear H1, question-shaped H2s, answer-first paragraphs, and explicit facts about the business, services, prices, and process.
Add structured data that matches the visible page: Organization, WebSite, Service, FAQPage, and Article where appropriate. Keep the same company details across the site and external profiles. Finally, publish material worth citing and make it easy for others to reference.
No one controls how a model weights sources, and providers change retrieval systems frequently. A GEO programme can improve the odds that your content is retrievable and quotable; it cannot guarantee inclusion in a specific answer.
Be cautious with vendors selling 'AI ranking guarantees'. The honest deliverable is a set of verifiable technical and content improvements, plus measurement of whether AI referrals and brand mentions grow over time.
A free, evidence-based review of the seven signals that decide whether AI crawlers can read your site.
Last reviewed 22 October 2026. If this answer is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
A website usually fails to appear in ChatGPT answers for one of four reasons: its crawler is blocked in robots.txt, the page depends on JavaScript that the crawler does not execute, the content does not state the answer and the business facts clearly, or the site has too little independent evidence for a model to trust it. Fixing crawl access and publishing clear, structured, factual content addresses the first three; reputation and citations address the fourth.
To get found by AI search, allow AI crawlers, publish clear answer-first content with explicit facts, add structured data, keep your company details consistent everywhere, and earn mentions on other trustworthy sites. Technical access gets you read; clarity gets you quoted; corroboration makes you worth citing.
To embed an AI chatbot, train it on your own content, configure the widget and allowed domains, then paste one script tag or iframe into your site's HTML. The chatbot should answer only from approved sources, show a clear AI disclosure, capture leads with consent, and hand off to a human when it cannot help.