SEO for AI: how to get your company to show up in ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity

What SEO for AI is called: GEO and AEO

Search for "SEO for AI" and you'll find two names. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is optimization for answer engines: the goal is for your content to be the direct answer shown by Google, voice assistants and AI-generated summaries. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is optimization for generative engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude: the goal is for your brand to be cited or recommended when someone asks about your market.

Neither replaces traditional SEO. Assistants that search the web start from pages that are already well crawled, fast and relevant. GEO and AEO are an extra layer: writing and structuring the site so a machine can extract the right answer and attribute it to you.

How ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity choose what to cite

These assistants answer in two ways. For general questions, they use what the language model learned in training. For questions that call for current or specific information, such as "which company automates customer service for clinics in my city", they run a live web search, read a few pages and build the answer, often with links to the sources.

In that second case, the assistant behaves like a reader in a hurry: it prefers pages that answer the question right at the start, in clear language, with verifiable information and signs that the source is trustworthy. A beautiful page that hides the answer in the middle of a long text or behind a click tends to be left out.

The term GEO comes from a 2023 academic study by researchers at Princeton and other institutions that tested what makes content appear more often in generative engine answers. Adding source citations, statistics and expert quotes increased visibility by up to 40%. Stuffing the text with keywords, the classic old-school SEO tactic, didn't help.

What to do on your site

The actions below carry the most weight and work for both Google and AI assistants:

• ✓A direct answer at the start: open every page or article with two or three sentences that answer the main question, without beating around the bush.
• ✓Subheadings phrased as questions: use your customers' real questions as section titles. It's the way people ask ChatGPT.
• ✓One page per service and per industry: a generic services page answers specific questions poorly. Dedicated pages, like our solutions by industry, give the assistant a precise text to cite.
• ✓Content visible in the HTML: many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript. Text that only appears after a click may not be read, so FAQs and definitions need to be in the page's code.
• ✓Structured data (schema): mark up your organization, services, articles, FAQs and breadcrumbs. It's how you tell the machine what each part of the page is.
• ✓Author and date: identify who wrote it, with credentials, and show when the content was published and updated.
• ✓Numbers with sources: say where every figure comes from. It's one of the signals the GEO study associated with more citations.
• ✓Crawlers allowed: check that your robots.txt doesn't block crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.

What to do off your site

AI assistants cross-check sources. If your company only exists on its own site, it has less chance of being recommended than a brand cited in several trusted places.

• ✓Consistent profiles: the same name, description, address and contact details on your Google Business Profile, Instagram, LinkedIn and industry directories.
• ✓Mentions on media and partner sites: interviews, guest articles and case studies published by third parties reinforce the brand's authority.
• ✓Reviews: real, recent reviews help with local search and with perceived trust.
• ✓Recurring content: publishing often on the same topic shows the company masters the subject. A content automation routine helps keep the pace.

What doesn't work

Repeating keywords over and over, creating dozens of nearly identical pages or publishing generic mass-produced text doesn't increase your presence in AI answers, and it hurts traditional SEO too.

Be wary of anyone who promises to guarantee your company will appear in ChatGPT. Nobody controls the answers these systems give. What you can do is improve your odds, with better content that is easier to cite.

How to measure whether it's working

There is no official ChatGPT ranking dashboard. Measurement is done in three ways:

• ✓Test questions: list 10 to 20 questions your customers would ask and run them every month in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. Note whether your company appears, in what position and with what description.
• ✓Referral traffic: in Google Analytics, track visits coming from domains such as chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai.
• ✓Search Console: see whether the optimized pages gain impressions on full-question searches, which are closest to the way people talk to AI.

Where to start

Start with the pages that already sell: services, products and the homepage. Adjust their direct answer, FAQs and structured data before producing new content. Then create articles that answer the questions customers ask before they buy.

If you want an assessment of how your brand shows up in these answers today and a plan of adjustments, that's one of the things our AI consulting for businesses covers.