How to Get Your Business Found by ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews
Search moved to AI assistants. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is how you become the answer they give.
To get found by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews, make your business easy for AI systems to crawl, parse, and trust: allow the AI crawlers, publish clear answer-first content backed by structured data, and keep your business facts consistent everywhere. That practice is called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO).
Search didn't die — it moved
More buyers now ask an assistant for a recommendation instead of scrolling a page of links. When someone asks ChatGPT “who does business automation near me,” or asks Google's AI Overview to compare options, the AI composes an answer and cites a handful of sources. GEO is how you become one of those sources.
The five things that make you citable
- Crawler access — your robots.txt must allow AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended. Block them and you're invisible to those engines.
- Structured data — schema markup (Organization, Service, FAQ, LocalBusiness) tells AI exactly who you are and what you do, in a format it trusts.
- Answer-first content — lead each page with a direct, quotable answer to the question a person would ask. AI lifts clear, self-contained passages.
- Consistent entity signals — your name, address, and phone should match across your site, Google Business Profile, and directories, or AI can't be sure it's the same business.
- Third-party mentions — being referenced on other reputable sites is what tips an AI from “aware of you” to “confident enough to recommend you.”
Files that help AI understand you
Beyond the basics, an llms.txt file (a plain-language index of your site for AI), an ai.txt policy, and machine-readable summaries give assistants a clean map of who you are. They aren't magic, but they remove friction — and most competitors don't have them yet.
How to know it's working
Track your mentions and citations across the AI engines over time, the same way you'd track rankings. When ChatGPT and Perplexity start naming you for your core questions, GEO is working.
