GEO: how to get your business cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity
Your customers already ask answer engines before they ask Google. GEO is the discipline of making sure the answer cites your business — and it starts with concrete technical decisions.
A growing share of commercial searches no longer ends on a results page — it ends in an answer. “Best LSF construction company near Lisbon?” asked of ChatGPT returns three names and a justification. Either your business is in that answer, or it doesn’t exist for that customer.
GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the discipline of optimising for answer engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews. It overlaps with classic SEO, but it isn’t the same thing. Here’s what changes in practice.
How answer engines choose whom to cite
AI assistants get information two ways: from what they learned in training, and from what they find in real-time searches. For a local or niche business, the second is what matters — and it can be influenced. Engines tend to cite pages that:
- Answer a concrete question directly, in a self-contained, quotable block of text;
- State facts verifiably — who, where, how much, since when;
- Have clean semantic structure — headings that are questions, lists, tables, structured data;
- Are consistent with other sources — what your site says about you matches LinkedIn, directories and press.
The technical checklist
1. Let the AI crawlers in. The first step is embarrassingly simple: many sites block GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot in robots.txt without knowing it. Check, and explicitly allow the ones that matter to you — including Google-Extended, which feeds Gemini.
2. Publish an llms.txt. A file at your site’s root that summarises, in plain markdown, who you are, what you do and where the important pages live. It’s an emerging standard that engines are starting to use for quick orientation.
3. Structured data, done properly. Schema.org isn’t decoration: Organization with address and contacts, Service for each service, FAQPage on your FAQs, Article on your articles. It’s the format machines read without ambiguity.
4. Write answer blocks. Every important page should contain paragraphs that work in isolation: “[Company] is [what], in [where], specialised in [what], since [when].” If an engine clipped that paragraph and showed it alone, would it answer the question? If yes, it’s citable.
5. FAQs with the real questions. Not the questions you wish people asked — the ones customers actually ask, in their words. Each answer in two to four sentences, direct, no sales fluff.
What doesn’t change
Genuinely useful content still wins. Answer engines are trained to reward usefulness and punish filler — more effectively than classic Google ever managed. Keyword-stuffing dies for good under GEO: an LLM immediately notices that the text says nothing.
The good news for small companies: GEO levels the field. A studio in Parede with clear pages, verifiable facts and structured data can get cited alongside companies ten times bigger with websites ten times worse. We know — it’s how we build our own sites and our clients’.
Where to start this week
- Check your robots.txt — can AI bots get in?
- Ask ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity what you do better than your competitors — and see whether you show up.
- Pick the five questions your customers ask most and publish direct answers, one page per topic.
- Add basic structured data: Organization, Service, FAQPage.
The rest is consistency. Answer engines update fast — results show up in weeks, not years.