GEO in plain English: how to get your brand cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews

A growing share of people now start their research in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews instead of a page of ten blue links. If your brand isn't in those answers, you don't exist at the exact moment someone is making up their mind.

The good part: getting cited is mostly SEO done properly, plus a few new habits. I've been working on this for my own products, including attribution that ties together Search Console, GA4 and traffic from AI assistants. This is what I've learned so far.

What GEO actually means

Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the work of getting your brand mentioned and linked in answers written by AI. Some people call it AEO (answer engine optimization) or LLM SEO. Same idea, different acronym.

It doesn't replace SEO. It sits on top of it. Most AI search products still begin by searching an index of web pages, so if you can't rank, you'll struggle to get cited.

How AI answers pick their sources

Simplified, most AI search experiences do three things:

1. Retrieve pages from a search index that match the question.
2. Pull out the passages that answer it most directly.
3. Write an answer from those passages, often citing the pages they used.

That gives you three jobs. Be retrievable: indexed, crawlable and fast. Be extractable: clear, self-contained answers. Be trustworthy: consistent facts about your brand across the web.

1. Let the right crawlers in

Start with robots.txt. A lot of sites block AI crawlers by accident, through blanket rules, security plugins or a CDN setting someone switched on years ago.

Decide on purpose which bots you allow. OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT search and ChatGPT-User when a person asks ChatGPT to open a page. GPTBot is the one used for training, and you can block it without disappearing from ChatGPT search. OpenAI lists all three in its crawler documentation. Perplexity uses PerplexityBot.

Google's AI Overviews use the normal Googlebot crawl, so if you're indexed in Google, you're eligible. Google explains this in its guide to AI features and your website.

Then check rendering. If your site builds everything with JavaScript in the browser, some crawlers see an almost empty page. Server-side rendering or pre-rendering fixes it. (This blog is server-rendered for exactly that reason.)

And keep your XML sitemap clean, with real last-modified dates.

2. Write answers that can be lifted

AI systems quote passages, not whole pages. Make your passages easy to quote.

• Put a direct two- or three-sentence answer right under every question-style heading. Then go deeper.
• Keep one idea per section, with headings that match how people actually phrase the question.
• Use lists and tables for steps, comparisons and specs.
• Add specifics: numbers, dates, prices, names. Vague content rarely gets cited, because there's nothing in it worth citing.
• Say who wrote it and why they know the subject. An author with real experience is easier to trust, for people and for machines.

3. Build trust in your brand as an entity

AI systems lean heavily on what the rest of the web says about you, not just what you say about yourself.

• Get listed and reviewed where your buyers look: directories, review sites, marketplaces and communities.
• Earn mentions in comparison articles and "best tools for X" lists. These get cited constantly. A short, personal email to the writer often does it, and my cold email playbook covers how to write one.
• Keep your facts consistent. Your pricing, features, founding year and location should match on your site, your social profiles and every listing. Conflicting facts make you look unreliable.
• Use structured data (Organization, Product, Article) so machines can read your key facts without guessing.
• Publish original data. Benchmarks and research get cited because nobody else has them.

4. Measure AI traffic in GA4

You can't improve what you can't see, and by default GA4 hides AI traffic inside "Referral". Fix that with a custom channel group:

1. In GA4, go to Admin, then Data display, then Channel groups, and create a new channel group.
2. Add a channel called "AI assistants" with the condition "Session source matches regex":

.*(chatgpt\.com|chat\.openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com|claude\.ai).*

3. Move the new channel above "Referral" in the list. Channels are matched in order, so if it sits below Referral it will never match anything.
4. Save it, then compare sessions, engagement and conversions from AI assistants with organic search.

Also watch branded searches in Search Console. When an AI answer mentions you without a link, people often search your name next. A rise in branded queries is a decent sign you're being mentioned.

5. Check whether you're being cited

There's no Search Console for ChatGPT yet, so I do this by hand once a month:

1. Write down the 20 questions your buyers ask before they buy.
2. Ask each one in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google, and check the AI Overview.
3. Log who gets mentioned and who gets linked in a simple spreadsheet.
4. Compare month to month.

It's tedious. It's also the closest thing to a rank tracker for AI search, and it tells you exactly which pages to work on next.

A 30-day GEO sprint

• Week 1: check robots.txt, rendering, your sitemap and structured data. If you haven't looked at the basics in a while, run my 30-day SEO audit first.
• Week 2: rewrite your 10 most important pages so each one opens with a direct answer.
• Week 3: fix inconsistent brand facts across profiles and directories, and pitch two comparison articles in your niche.
• Week 4: set up the AI assistants channel in GA4 and run the 20-question test.

Repeat the question test every month. GEO rewards the same thing SEO always has: being the clearest, most trustworthy answer to a real question.