When a customer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a supplier, the answer is formulated by an AI that has picked a handful of sources. GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, is the work of becoming one of those sources. This guide explains how AI search chooses its answers and what you can concretely do.
More and more people start their research in an AI service instead of a list of results, and Google’s own AI Overviews answer a growing share of searches directly above the regular results. The difference from classic search is brutal: a link list can show ten companies, an AI answer often mentions just a couple. Either you are one of them, or you are not in the conversation.
AI services read the web much like Google, but reward different things when choosing what to cite: clear structure that can be understood by machines, content that answers the question directly instead of talking around it, structured data confirming who the sender is, and consistent information about the company across the web.
Everything that is good SEO is a prerequisite for GEO (new to SEO? Start with the beginner’s guide). But GEO puts higher demands on three areas: the semantics (headings and structure must be unambiguous, not just pretty), the answers (the first paragraph should be liftable and work as an answer on its own) and the machine readability (schema, and a deliberate policy for AI crawlers instead of blocking them by mistake).
1. Test your current state. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity what your customers would ask, for example which suppliers are recommended in your industry and city. Are you mentioned?
2. Write answer-first. Start every important page with a paragraph that answers the page’s main question directly.
3. Structure the content. One question per heading, one answer per section. FAQ sections are AI candy when they are real questions with real answers.
4. Let the right crawlers in. Many sites block AI crawlers out of old habit, making themselves invisible. Set a deliberate policy in robots.txt and point out your most important content with llms.txt.
5. Measure and follow up. AI visibility can be measured: which questions are you mentioned in, and how is that changing? Without measurement you do not know whether the work is paying off.
In the first years of the AI boom, many websites blocked all AI crawlers in panic. That can be a deliberate choice for content sites, but for a business that wants to be found it is like putting a note on the door saying salespeople may not recommend you. Check your robots.txt: if it blocks GPTBot and ClaudeBot, you have opted out of AI visibility, deliberately or not.
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: the work of making a website readable and citable for AI-driven search services like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews.
Yes, if your customers use AI services. Good SEO gets you high in the link list, but if the answer is formulated by an AI without mentioning you, the business goes elsewhere. The good news is that a solid SEO foundation makes the GEO step a short one.
Yes. You systematically ask the questions customers ask and record whether and how the brand is mentioned, month by month. At Beat Web the monthly report has its own AI visibility section.
With us GEO is not sold as a separate service but included in the SEO work: ongoing SEO with GEO and a monthly report from SEK 3,990 per month. This website is built with the same method.
Book a free consultation and we will ask the questions your customers ask and see who the AI highlights today.
