GEO Guide.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the work of making your brand show up, accurately, in answers written by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.

It has two goals. First, AI systems should know your brand and describe it correctly. Second, when a buyer asks for options in your category, the answer should recommend you. GEO is the set of changes, on your own site and across the web, that move both.

If you have not read it yet, the AI Search Guide explains how these assistants find and choose brands. This guide is about what to do with that.

GEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it. Many AI answers are written from pages the assistant finds through a search, so a site that cannot be crawled or ranked starts at a disadvantage. The difference is in what you are aiming for.

Every brand starts in a different place, but the order rarely changes: measure, fix the facts, make your pages easy to quote, earn mentions elsewhere, and keep measuring.

Research the questions your buyers ask and run them on every engine you care about. Record whether you are named, your position, whether you are cited, which competitors appear and which sources the answers use. Keep the question set fixed so later checks are comparable.

This baseline does two jobs: it shows you which engines and question types you are missing from, and it hands you the list of sources that shape your category's answers.

Ask each engine what it knows about your brand. Wrong founding dates, discontinued products, an old pricing model or a confused category are common. Trace each error to the pages that probably cause it and correct them at the source.

• State plainly on your homepage and About page what you do, who it is for, where you operate and what it costs, if you can.
• Keep the same facts on your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, app store listings and industry directories.
• Add Organization and Product structured data (schema.org) so the facts are machine-readable.
• Retire or update old pages, press releases and listings that contradict the current story.

Assistants quote pages that answer questions directly. Rework your most important pages so the answer comes first and the detail follows.

• Lead with a one or two sentence answer to the question the page targets.
• Use headings that match how buyers phrase their questions.
• Put prices, limits, integrations and specifications in plain text or tables, not only in images or PDFs.
• Publish honest comparison and alternatives pages for the competitors buyers ask about. Say where a competitor is the better fit; it makes the rest of the page more credible.
• Date your pages and keep the ones about prices and features current.

Your own site can only say so much. Answers lean heavily on third-party sources: review platforms, comparison articles, industry publications, community discussions and curated lists. Your audit shows exactly which of these the engines cite in your category.

Work through that list. Get reviewed where reviews matter, contribute expertise to the publications the answers cite, and ask to be considered for the comparison pages that already name your competitors. One mention on a source the engines trust usually does more than many on sites they ignore.

Check that your robots.txt and your firewall do not block the crawlers AI search uses. The main ones are OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search) and GPTBot (model training), PerplexityBot, and Googlebot, which feeds AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google-Extended controls whether your content is used for Gemini training, separately from search.

Make sure key content is in the HTML, not loaded only by scripts, and that pages load quickly. Some sites publish an llms.txt file summarising what they do; it is cheap to add, but there is no evidence yet that the major engines rely on it.

Re-run the same questions every month. Fact fixes on your own site can show up within weeks for engines that search the web; changes in what a model knows without searching move more slowly, with each model update. Expect gains in mentions and share of voice to build over two to four months of steady work.

Watch the sources list as well as your score. When a new comparison article starts appearing in answers, it is either an opportunity or a threat.

• Hidden instructions for AI. Text that tells models to recommend you, hidden from human visitors, is manipulation. Engines filter it, and being caught damages trust in your brand.
• Fake reviews and paid placements presented as independent. They break platform rules and consumer protection law in many countries.
• Mass-produced pages. Hundreds of thin, near-identical pages aimed at every possible question rarely get cited and can drag down how search engines judge your whole site.
• Anyone who guarantees placement. AI platforms decide their own answers. Measurable improvement is realistic; guarantees are not.

Start with the measurement. Without a fixed set of questions and a baseline, you cannot tell which changes worked. Recvis runs that audit across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews, then does the work and tracks it monthly. Talk to us if you want help.