Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of getting your business named and cited when ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews answer a customer's question. It sits on top of SEO: search engines have to find your site before an AI can quote it.
Behind most "what is GEO?" questions sits a more practical worry: when a customer skips the search box and asks an AI assistant instead, does your name come up? Questions typed into an assistant tend to be longer and more specific than search queries, like "Can you suggest a quiet campsite near Antalya that works for a family with kids?" The assistant reads a handful of sources, writes one answer, and usually links to some of those sources alongside it. GEO is about being one of them.
Generative engine optimization and SEO: where they part ways
A classic results page gives you a list, and you decide what to click. An AI answer makes most of that choice for you. It pulls information from several pages, rewrites it in its own words, and credits only some of them as sources. With SEO, the goal is to rank high on the list. With GEO, the goal is to make the short list of sources, and to be described accurately once you're on it.
Nobody outside these companies knows exactly how AI systems pick their sources, and it varies by platform. Still, there's a broadly accepted picture. The pages that get used tend to share four traits. They're crawlable: bots can reach them and read the content. They're clear: they answer the question without detours. They're consistent: they match what other sources say. And they're credible: it's obvious who wrote them, and the business is mentioned elsewhere too.
The first of those traits is pure SEO. For a page to appear as a link in Google's AI Overviews, it has to be indexed in regular Google Search first. That's why GEO builds on SEO instead of replacing it. On a site with technical problems, much of the effort you put into GEO can go to waste.
Answer the question in the first sentence
AI systems tend to lift the specific passage that answers a question, so every section of your page should make sense when read on its own. The formula is simple: turn the question into a heading, give the short answer in the first sentence, and add the detail after that.
To get started, write down the ten questions you hear most often on the phone, over WhatsApp, or in the store. Each one should become either the heading of its own page or an entry in an FAQ section. On a dietitian's site, the first sentence under "How do online consultations work?" should sum up the whole process in one breath: how the first session happens, when the meal plan arrives, how follow-ups continue. Opening with something like "your journey to a healthier life" just pushes the real answer further down.
If you use a term specific to your trade, define it in one sentence. A line like "A site survey is a visit where the contractor measures the space and agrees with you on what the job covers and which materials to use" helps your customer, and it's clear enough for an AI to repeat as is. The opening paragraph of this article follows the same pattern: it starts with a definition and wraps up in two sentences.
One last check: phrases that show up on every website, like "quality service," "expert team," or "affordable prices," carry nothing worth quoting. Ask yourself whether a competitor could paste the same sentence onto their site without changing a word. If they could, swap it for something specific: the areas you serve, the brands you work with, how ordering, delivery, or returns work.
Keep your business details identical everywhere
When an AI assistant describes your business, it may look well beyond your website, reading your map listing, your social profiles, and your directory entries as well. When those sources agree, the odds of an accurate description go up. When they conflict, the assistant may repeat an old address or credit you with a service you no longer offer.
For keeping your name, address, and phone number consistent, the "Local SEO" post on our blog walks through the steps. GEO adds one more item to that list: a one-sentence description of your business. It answers four questions: who you are, what you do, who you serve, and where. For example: "We renovate and redecorate homes and offices in Ankara." Use that sentence, with the same substance, on your About page, in your Google Business Profile description, and in your Instagram and LinkedIn bios. Writing a fresh description for every channel blurs which version is true for a system reading all of them at once.
Structured data is another way to spell things out for machines. It means marking up details like your address, services, and opening hours in a format search engines understand. In business markup, the "sameAs" property lists your official profiles (Instagram, LinkedIn, your map listing) one by one, making it explicit that those scattered accounts belong to the same business. Its effect on AI answers can't be measured in isolation, but it's one of the established ways to state your details so they can't be misread.
Can AI crawlers get into your site?
A page has to be readable before it can be cited. On Google's side, that's handled by regular indexing. Tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity also send out crawlers of their own.
A small file called robots.txt tells each crawler which parts of your site it may visit. Type yoursite.com/robots.txt into your browser to see yours. One distinction matters here: some companies use separate crawlers for search and for model training. OpenAI, for instance, uses OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search and GPTBot for training, so you can opt out of training and stay open to search. Google's Google-Extended token covers whether your content is used for Gemini models, and it doesn't affect your place in Google Search. Crawler names change from time to time, so check each platform's current documentation before you decide.
Even with a clean robots.txt, some security and hosting services block AI crawlers by default, so ask your hosting provider about that setting too.
The second check is whether your content arrives with the page. Some sites only show their text after JavaScript runs in the browser. Some AI crawlers run little or no JavaScript, so on a page like that they may find nothing but an empty shell. Pages prepared on the server and delivered with their full text lower that risk. A quick test: right-click the page, choose "View page source," and search for an important sentence. If it isn't there, a crawler may not see it either. If your price list, menu, or service areas live only inside an image or a PDF, add the same information to the page as text. Speed belongs on this list too: a crawler reading many pages in a short time may skip one that loads slowly or times out.
Some of this groundwork can be handled at the infrastructure level. On Regnos, a website platform we developed, service businesses pick a sector-specific theme as the starting point for a new site. SEO and GEO tooling is part of the platform itself, so every site is prepared for classic search and AI-generated answers alike. The infrastructure keeps the door open. Writing what visitors find once they're inside is still up to the business.
You may also have heard about llms.txt, a proposed file format for giving AI tools a summary of your site. It's unclear whether the major platforms use it regularly, so don't put it at the top of your to-do list.
What other people write about you
When an AI recommends a business, it often looks past that business's own website. Reviews, comparison articles, industry listings, and news coverage can all feed into the answer. Generally speaking, when what you say on your site is backed up elsewhere, that counts as a sign of trust.
With reviews, the words matter as much as the stars. "We were very happy" doesn't answer anyone's question. "The kitchen renovation finished on the promised date, using the materials agreed during the site survey" does. When asking for a review, you can invite customers to mention which service they used and how it went, without putting words in their mouths. Paid or fake reviews look like a shortcut, but they break platform rules and wear down trust.
Check industry listings too: trade association and chamber of commerce member directories, and the "where to buy" pages of brands you sell. Are you listed? Is your name spelled correctly? Does the entry link to your site? Local news sites do a similar job. A story about your new branch or an event you sponsored tells both people and machines, in someone else's words, that your business is real and active. Buying links or pushing the same promotional article out to dozens of sites usually backfires.
What can you expect, and how do you track it?
The honest answer first: visibility in AI answers can't be guaranteed. Ask the same question twice, or let someone else ask it on another day, and the answer may change. There's no fixed ranking where you can say "we're in third place," the way you can in classic search. If someone offers to "get you to the top of ChatGPT," be careful.
Tracking the trend is still possible. List 10 to 15 questions your customers ask. At regular intervals, say once a month, put them to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google. Each time, note three things. Are you mentioned? Is your site linked? Is what it says about you correct? If you spot an error (an old address, a closed branch, a service you don't offer), trace it back to its source. More often than not, it turns out to be an outdated directory entry or a forgotten profile. Fix the source instead of arguing with the assistant.
In Google Analytics, the traffic source reports can show visits from addresses like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, or gemini.google.com as separate rows. Clicks from Google's AI Overviews, on the other hand, are usually counted inside your regular search data in Search Console. Pay less attention to how many of these visits there are and more to what those visitors do: did they fill in a form, call, or book?
Finally, if your contact form asks "How did you hear about us?", add "AI assistant (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.)" to the options. That small field catches recommendations your analytics can't see.
Try it on your own business: three steps
First, ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google the five questions your customers ask most, and record who gets mentioned and which sites are cited. Second, write the one sentence that describes your business and use it on your site, your business profile, and your social accounts. Third, open yoursite.com/robots.txt to see whether AI crawlers are blocked, then search the source of your most important service page for its key sentence.
Want to go deeper on the technical side? Our SEO & GEO service starts where these steps end, bringing the technical audit, the keyword map, and GEO content structure together in one plan.
