AI visibility guide
What is GEO, and what does AI visibility mean?
The short answer
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the work of getting a business into the answers AI assistants write, described correctly: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews. It doesn't replace SEO. It builds on it, because these assistants search the web before they answer.
AI visibility comes down to three things you can measure: whether you're named when someone asks about what you sell, whether your site is cited as a source, and whether what's said about you is right.
How to get your business mentioned in ChatGPT
There's no way to list your business in ChatGPT. What it looks at when it searches the web, and five steps to make it more likely to name your business.
Why doesn't ChatGPT recommend my business?
Six common reasons ChatGPT or Perplexity name your competitors and not you, and how to check each one on your site and beyond it.
Google's AI Overviews: how to appear as a source
What Google's AI Overviews are, what Google asks for before it uses a page as a source, and where to see the traffic in Search Console.
How to measure your brand's AI visibility
How to measure whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google name your brand: which questions to use, how often, what to count and which free tools help.
GEO vs SEO: what changes and what stays the same
GEO and SEO share the technical base and useful content. The goal, the metrics and the weight of what other sites say about you change. A clear comparison.
AI visibility by industry
What AI cites depends on the business: listings for a restaurant, comparisons for SaaS, directories for a firm. What to look at in each case.
GEO and AI visibility glossary
GEO terms explained without jargon: AI Overviews, mention, citation, AI crawler, llms.txt, IndexNow, entity and more, with examples.
How the SearchedBy free scan works
What the SearchedBy free scan does, step by step: the questions it asks AI, what it checks on your site, what data it keeps and what it can't tell you.
How much AI weighs today
More people ask an AI assistant for a recommendation instead of going through a list of links. The answer names only a few businesses. If yours isn't among them, that customer may not come across it.
Keep it in proportion, though. In September 2026 Google sent 99.91% of the visits coming from the Google + ChatGPT pair in the UK, and ChatGPT 0.09%; in the US the split was 99.81% and 0.19% (StatCounter, which measures referrals to the sites in its network, not how much people use the assistants). So AI is worth working on for brand and accuracy, while classic SEO still brings the traffic.
The three questions GEO answers
- Does AI name you? How often your brand comes up in answers about your field, without the user typing your name.
- Does it cite you? Whether the answer links to your site as a source, or to someone else: directories, the press, comparison sites.
- Is it right? Whether the town, services, prices or opening hours the AI repeats match reality.
None of the three can be guaranteed. What you can do is measure them in a way you can repeat, and fix what's in your hands: your site, your Google Business Profile and what other sites say about you.
What assistants do before they answer
When a question needs it, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google search the web, read a few pages and build the answer from what they find. They use their own crawlers to do it: OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI), PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Googlebot. If your robots.txt or firewall blocks them, your site can't be a source.
Google says so in its documentation: there are no extra requirements for AI Overviews and AI Mode. The page has to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet, and no special structured data is needed.
What the evidence supports (and what it doesn't)
| Lever | What's known | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| A site that can be crawled and indexed | Google's own requirement; the other engines also need to read the page | Essential |
| Answering the exact question | Topical relevance is the most reproducible lever in the research | High |
| Your brand mentioned on other sites | The strongest correlate of appearing in AI Overviews (Ahrefs, 75,000 brands); a correlation that doesn't prove cause | High |
| Consistent facts everywhere | The same name, address and services on your site, your Google profile and directories | High for local businesses |
| Structured data (schema) | No measurable effect on AI citations in a test of 1,885 pages (Ahrefs, May 2026) | Low as an AI lever |
| llms.txt | No engine documents using it; no correlation across about 300,000 domains | No evidence |
A word on big brands: in unbranded category questions, major brands took 62.2% of mentions and niche brands 9.0% (Chen et al., preprint). A small business stands a better chance with local, niche or specific use-case questions.
Where to start
- See what AI says today to five real questions from your customers. Do it by hand or with the free scan.
- Check that your site lets the search crawlers in and that the important content is in the HTML, not only in JavaScript.
- Write one clear page for each important question: the answer first, with facts people can check.
- Fix your details on your Google Business Profile and in the directories for your field.
- Measure again every month with the same questions.
More detail in: getting mentioned in ChatGPT, why AI doesn't recommend your business, Google's AI Overviews, how to measure, GEO vs SEO and what changes by industry. The terms are in the glossary.
Common questions
Is GEO the same as AEO or LLMO?
Close enough. AEO is answer engine optimisation and LLMO is optimisation for large language models. GEO is the name most of the industry uses, and the one the 2024 research paper used.
Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT?
Not inside the text of the answer. ChatGPT does show ads, labelled as ads, below the answer (including in the UK and the US), and Google has documented ads in AI Overviews in English. That's advertising, not a mention. If someone guarantees you a mention in the answer, ask them how they measure it.
How long before a change shows?
It depends on the engine and the change. A technical fix can show within weeks, once the engines read the page again; mentions on other sites take longer. That's why you measure monthly and look at ranges.
Sources
- Google Search Central, ‘AI features and your website’ (2025-12-10)
- StatCounter, Google vs ChatGPT, United Kingdom (2026-09)
- StatCounter, Google vs ChatGPT, United States (2026-09)
- Ahrefs, brand mentions and AI Overviews (2026-04)
- Ahrefs, schema and AI citations (2026-05)
- Search Engine Journal on SE Ranking's llms.txt study (2025-11-20)
- Chen et al., big-brand bias in AI answers (preprint) (2025-09)
- Aggarwal et al., ‘GEO: Generative Engine Optimization’, KDD 2024 (2024-08)