GEO & AI Search

GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization, is the practice of optimizing content so that generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews retrieve, summarize, and cite your site when answering buyer queries. In plain terms, it is the work of becoming one of the brands that gets named, instead of one of ten links a user has to click.

ChatGPT's citation choices in web search are driven by a layered retrieval-and-rank pipeline covering query rewrites, web fetch, content extractability, source authority signals, and recency. The model picks 3-10 sources to ground the answer. The article names structured, answer-first content with clean schema and entity disambiguation as the single biggest lever for getting cited.

llms.txt is a plain markdown file served at the root of a domain that gives LLMs a curated index of your most important pages. It is not officially honored by OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google as of 2026, and the file is optional. It is not a replacement for robots.txt, sitemap.xml, or proper schema.

Start with the layer closest to how your buyers already search. If they still Google and click, SEO is the base and everything else compounds on it. If they increasingly ask ChatGPT or Perplexity before they ever reach Google, GEO stops being optional. If you have decent SEO already, start with GEO.