Generative engine optimisation (GEO): how to get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of making your business and your content easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity to find, trust and mention when they write an answer. SEO competes for a place on a results page. GEO competes for a mention inside the answer itself, where there’s often room for only three to five sources.

Try this. Open ChatGPT and ask it to recommend a business like yours in your town. Are you there? If you are, brilliant, this guide will help you stay there. If not, don’t panic. It’s usually fixable, and the research gives us a pretty clear idea of how.

What is generative engine optimisation?

A generative engine writes an answer instead of listing results. ChatGPT search, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and Claude all do this. Each one gathers possible sources, reads them, and writes a single reply, naming a few of those sources along the way.

The name comes from a paper led by researchers at Princeton University and IIT Delhi, published in 2023 and presented at the ACM KDD conference in 2024. They built a test set of 10,000 questions, changed the source pages in careful, controlled ways, and measured how often and how prominently each page turned up in the answers.

GEO works on two levels:

• Your content: passages that are specific, backed by evidence and easy to quote.
• Your business: a company that engines can recognise and trust, with the same facts repeated in reliable places.

What the research says works

The KDD paper tested nine changes to content. The ones that worked best were simple, and honestly, they’re just good writing:

• Adding quotes from a credible person or source.
• Adding statistics instead of vague claims.
• Citing sources, naming and linking where your facts come from.

These raised visibility by up to 40% across the test set, and by up to 37% when tried on Perplexity, a live engine. Making the writing clearer and easier to read helped too. And keyword stuffing, the oldest SEO trick in the book? It did very little.

A couple of words of caution. The gains varied by subject: statistics helped most on factual and business topics, quotes on topics about people and society. And this was a controlled study, so think of it as strong evidence about the kind of content engines like to use, rather than a promise.

How AI assistants pick their sources

You don’t need every technical detail, but four things shape the plan.

1. They search before they write. Google’s AI features use Google’s index. Copilot uses Bing. ChatGPT search and Perplexity use their own crawlers alongside search partners. If your page isn’t in those indexes, it can’t be mentioned.
2. They read passages, not whole pages. The engine pulls out the paragraphs that best match the question. Sections that answer first, under clear headings, are much easier to use.
3. They cross-check. Engines prefer facts that show up the same way in several trusted places. If your website says one thing and an old directory says another, you look less reliable.
4. They like recent, dated information on topics that change, such as prices, rules and technology.

The GEO plan: eight things to do

1. Get into both indexes, quickly

Verify your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your XML sitemap to both, and switch on IndexNow so new and updated pages are announced to Bing and others within seconds. Bing’s index feeds Copilot and is one of the sources behind ChatGPT search, so it matters far more than its market share suggests.

2. Let the right crawlers in

Check your robots.txt file for blocks on bots like Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, PerplexityBot and ClaudeBot. Then check your CDN. Some security tools, including Cloudflare’s AI crawler controls, can block AI bots before they ever see your robots.txt. Choose on purpose. Search and answer bots are usually worth letting in; bots that only collect training data are a separate business decision.

3. Make it obvious who you are

Use one name, one address, one phone number and one short description everywhere. Link to your official profiles from your website, and link back to your website from them. Add Organization schema with sameAs links to LinkedIn, your Google Business Profile, Companies House and your other profiles. If you’re part of a group, explain the relationship clearly.

4. Show evidence instead of adjectives

Every important claim should come with a number, a named example or a source. “We cut a client’s cost per lead by 31% in four months” can be quoted. “We deliver outstanding results” can’t.

5. Create data people want to link to

Engines and journalists both love original data. A short yearly survey, a look at your own anonymised client results or a well-kept statistics page gives other sites a reason to link to you, and gives engines a reason to quote you.

6. Write passages that can stand on their own

Under each question heading, answer in 40 to 80 words that make sense by themselves. Avoid “as mentioned above” and other phrases that stop making sense when the passage is lifted out.

7. Get mentioned on sites engines already trust

Trade magazines, local news, trade bodies, podcasts, review sites and well-run online communities often appear in AI answers. Good PR and genuine expert comment build the outside proof that engines look for.

8. Answer the “which one should I choose?” questions

People ask assistants “which is better”, “how much does it cost” and “who’s the best in Brighton for…”. Pages that answer those honestly, including when you’re not the right fit, get used in AI answers all the time.

Technical GEO checklist

• Your content is in the HTML, so it’s visible without running JavaScript.
• Fast pages that pass Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1).
• Tidy headings: one H1, then clear H2s, written as questions where it makes sense.
• Schema for Organization, Service, Article and FAQPage where it fits, valid and matching the page.
• A visible “last updated” date on guides and statistics.
• An XML sitemap listing every important page, submitted to Google and Bing.
• IndexNow pings whenever you publish or update.
• An llms.txt file is optional. It’s a suggested standard with little evidence that the big engines use it yet, so treat it as a cheap extra rather than a priority.

How to measure GEO

GEO reporting is still young, so combine a few signals:

• A monthly question check. Every month, ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity and Google AI Mode the same 20 to 40 questions your buyers ask. Note whether you’re named, linked or left out, and which competitors appear.
• Visits from AI assistants. In GA4, group visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, copilot.microsoft.com and similar sites into their own channel.
• How well AI visitors convert. The numbers are small but the quality is high. Ahrefs found AI search brought 0.5% of its visitors and 12.1% of its sign-ups, and Semrush estimates an AI search visitor is worth 4.4 times a normal search visitor on average.
• Searches for your name and direct visits. People who meet your name in an answer often go looking for you afterwards.

GEO for local UK businesses

Local questions like “best accountant in Hove for landlords” or “who fixes electric gates near Worthing” are more and more often answered by an assistant. Local GEO rests on:

• A complete, active Google Business Profile with your services, photos and recent reviews.
• The same details on directories and trade body listings.
• Location pages with real local detail, not copy-and-paste text with the town name swapped.
• Reviews that mention the service and the place in the customer’s own words.

Your questions, answered

Ready for some help?

Want to know which AI assistants already mention you, and which mention your competitors instead? We’ll run the check and talk you through what we find, no jargon. Book a free AI visibility check, or grab some quick ideas from our free marketing ideas tool.