What is GEO, and how do you get cited by ChatGPT?

A growing share of buying research now starts inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google's AI Overviews rather than a list of blue links. That changes the shape of the problem in a way most SEO advice hasn't caught up with.

Why it isn't just SEO with a new name

Classic search gives you a ranked list. Position eight still gets clicks. An AI answer names two or three sources and moves on — so the distribution isn't a long tail, it's winner-takes-most.

The three things that actually matter

1. Can the crawlers reach you?

This sounds trivial and is the single most common failure we find. Plenty of sites block GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended in robots.txt — sometimes deliberately, often because someone pasted a blocklist from a blog post in 2023. You cannot be cited by a system that isn't allowed to read you.

2. Have you told machines who you are?

Structured data — JSON-LD — is how you state, unambiguously, what your organization is, what you sell, where you operate and what you charge. Without it, an assistant has to infer all of that from prose, and inference is where confident errors come from.

• →Organization or LocalBusiness, so you exist as an entity rather than a page
• →Service entries with real prices, so a pricing question can name you
• →FAQPage on your genuine questions — these get lifted into answers verbatim
• →Breadcrumbs, so the shape of your site is legible

3. Is your content actually quotable?

Assistants lift passages, not pages. A wall of prose with no headings is hard to quote from; a page where each section answers one question cleanly is easy. The practical test: pick any paragraph on your site and read it alone. Does it still make sense and say something specific? If not, it can't be cited.

The single highest-leverage GEO edit is usually rewriting your best page so every section answers exactly one question and can stand on its own.

What about llms.txt?

It's an emerging convention: a plain-text file at your root summarizing what your site is and where the important pages live. Adoption is uneven, and Google has said it doesn't use it. But it costs an hour, it's trivially kept accurate if you generate it from your own data, and very few of your competitors have one. We ship it for clients and on our own site for exactly that reason — not because we can promise it moves a number.

How to know if it's working

1. 01Ask the assistants directly, on a schedule. 'Who are the best [your category] in [your city]?' Track whether you appear, and in which position.
2. 02Watch for referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and similar in your analytics — it's small but it converts unusually well.
3. 03Check crawler access after every deploy. A robots.txt change is one line and can silently undo everything else.
4. 04Track brand mentions across the wider web. Assistants weight what others say about you, not only what you say.

The honest caveat

GEO is young, the systems are opaque, and anyone quoting you a guaranteed citation rate is guessing. What we can say is that the underlying work — accessible pages, accurate structured data, clear self-contained writing — is the same work that has always made sites easy to understand. That was worth doing before assistants existed.