Get cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews
AI Search Optimization AI search optimization, also called generative engine optimization or GEO, is the practice of structuring content so that AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews can extract, attribute and cite it when answering a question.
Why this matters
A growing share of research now ends before anyone clicks a link. Google AI Mode returns a conversational answer with no organic blue links at all, which makes citation the only visibility mechanism on that surface.
Google's own position is that this is still SEO rather than a separate discipline, and the evidence supports it: the large majority of AI Overview citations come from pages already ranking in the top ten. What changes is the shape of the content. AI systems extract self-contained passages, so a definition buried in paragraph six is invisible while the same definition in the first fifty words gets quoted.
The work is therefore unglamorous and specific: answer-first passages, question-shaped headings, unambiguous entity markup, primary sources cited by name, and crawler access for the agents that do not execute JavaScript.
Problems this solves
- Competitors named in AI answers about your category while you are not
- A JavaScript site that AI crawlers cannot read at all
- Content that ranks but is never quoted
- No idea whether AI assistants mention the brand
What GEO includes
- 01
Crawler access audit
- GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended checked and configured in robots.txt. Blocking these by accident is common and invisible.
- 02
Server-side rendering check
- AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. If your content only exists after hydration, it does not exist to them. We identify it and fix it.
- 03
Passage-level restructuring
- Definitions moved to the opening lines, self-contained answer blocks built at the length these systems actually extract, headings rewritten as the questions people ask.
- 04
Entity and schema clarity
- Organization, Person and Service markup with sameAs links so the brand, its people and its offerings resolve as recognised entities rather than strings.
- 05
Brand mention strategy
- Mentions across the sources these systems lean on, weighted by platform. Independent analysis puts brand mentions well ahead of backlinks as a correlate of AI citation.
How we run it
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Visibility baseline
Query the major assistants for your category terms and record who they cite today.
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Access and rendering
Crawler permissions and server-side rendering fixed first. Nothing else matters if the content is unreadable.
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Content restructuring
Key pages rebuilt into extractable, attributable passages.
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Entity and mentions
Schema, sameAs coverage and off-site presence built out.
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Re-measure
The same assistant queries repeated on a schedule to track citation share.
What you end up with
- Content AI systems can actually read and quote
- A brand that resolves as a recognised entity, not an ambiguous string
- Citation share tracked as its own metric alongside rankings
- The same work strengthens conventional rankings, because it is the same signals
Common questions about ai search optimization
Is GEO different from SEO?
Not fundamentally. Google states plainly that AI Overviews and AI Mode are grounded in the same ranking and quality systems as ordinary search, and that GEO and AEO are rebranded labels for SEO. What differs is emphasis: extractability, attribution and entity clarity matter more than they did, and JavaScript rendering matters far more because AI crawlers do not execute it.
Does an llms.txt file help?
There is no evidence that it does. Google representatives have said it is not used, and independent server-log studies have found major AI crawlers do not request it. We will add one because it costs nothing, but we will not tell you it is a ranking lever, and anyone selling it as one is guessing.
How do you measure whether it is working?
By asking the assistants. We run a fixed set of category queries against ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews on a schedule and record which domains get cited. Citation share over time is the metric. It is imperfect and non-deterministic, and we report it that way.
Should we block AI crawlers instead?
That is a real strategic choice, not an oversight. Blocking training crawlers protects content from being absorbed into models; blocking search crawlers removes you from AI answers entirely. The two are separable, and we will walk you through which is which before changing anything.