Get Your Business Recommended by AI

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your brand discoverable and citable inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Perplexity. Instead of optimizing for a ranked list of blue links, you optimize for whether and how an AI model mentions you when a customer asks about your category. It combines content, source presence, and reputation signals that language models draw on when they compose an answer.

SEO aims to rank a page in a list of results; GEO aims to be the source an AI model names and cites in a single synthesized answer. The two overlap heavily — every major answer engine retrieves real web pages and synthesizes them, so the same fundamentals of crawlable, credible, well-structured content carry over. Google goes furthest in framing its AI features as an extension of search, while ChatGPT and Perplexity each run their own retrieval and weight signals differently, so results vary by engine. What GEO adds on top of classic SEO is measurement of things SEO never tracked: how often you are mentioned across engines, your share of voice versus competitors, the sentiment of those mentions, and which third-party sources (Reddit, G2, Wikipedia, news) each model leans on. In short: SEO gets you indexed; GEO gets you cited — and lets you see it.

The fundamentals are remarkably consistent across engines. Publish unique, genuinely helpful content that answers the specific questions in your category, and answer them directly and high on the page. Keep it crawlable: OpenAI says any public site can appear in ChatGPT search as long as you are not blocking its search crawler, and the same logic applies to Perplexity's and Google's crawlers. Use clean, semantic HTML so models can extract your content, keep it fresh — Perplexity in particular weights recency heavily — and earn authentic mentions on the third-party sources these models trust, rather than manufactured ones, which Google warns do not help. There is no special markup or llms.txt file that unlocks citations. citeme shows you, across the engines it tracks, exactly which prompts you are missing from and which sources are shaping the answer, so you know what to publish or pitch next.

AI visibility measures how often and how favourably AI answer engines mention your brand when people ask questions in your category. Share of voice expresses that as the percentage of relevant answers you appear in versus your competitors. Tracking it over time tells you whether your GEO work is actually moving how AI talks about you, per engine and per market.

Start with the engines your customers actually use to research and decide. ChatGPT is still the most popular, followed by Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Perplexity. Answers can differ sharply between engines because each draws on different sources, so monitoring more than one avoids blind spots. citeme runs your prompts across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Perplexity — and can simulate different customer personas and regions.

Not on its own. No major answer engine treats structured data or an llms.txt file as a requirement for being cited. Google is the most explicit — it says its AI features do not need structured data and that Google Search simply ignores llms.txt — and there is no evidence the other leading engines treat either as a shortcut. Structured data is still worth maintaining as part of normal SEO, since it makes you eligible for rich results and keeps your key facts machine-readable. An llms.txt file is a low-cost optional bet: keep it only if a specific service you rely on actually reads it, because the major AI engines today largely do not. The durable lever everywhere is unique, helpful, well-structured content backed by real expertise.

It varies by category and how competitive your space is. Because these engines mostly sit on top of conventional search and crawlable content — Google's AI features are built directly on its search index, while the others lean on their own crawlers and licensed indexes — the content and reputation work tends to compound over weeks rather than days. The practical approach is to measure your baseline visibility first, ship the highest-impact actions, and re-measure on a regular cadence, which is the loop citeme is built around.