How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini (GEO)

Buyers now ask AI models, not just Google

More and more purchase research starts inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity: "Who's the best Google Ads agency for a US home-services business?" If your business isn't legible to these models, you're invisible in a channel that's growing fast.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) — sometimes called AI SEO or LLMO — is the practice of making your business easy for large language models to understand, trust, and cite. It overlaps with SEO but adds a few things AI systems specifically reward.

How LLMs decide who to recommend

LLMs surface businesses from three sources:

1. Training data — what was on the web when the model was trained.
2. Live retrieval / browsing — what the model can fetch now (Bing, Google, or a search index).
3. Structured signals — schema.org data, clean entity pages, and machine-readable files.

You can't retrain the model. You can control retrieval and structured signals — and that's where the wins are.

The GEO checklist we run

1. Make your entity unambiguous

Models need to know exactly who you are. That means consistent name, address, and contact across the web, plus rich Organization structured data: founding date, founder, services (knowsAbout), an OfferCatalog, areaServed, and a valid logo.

2. Answer questions in citable form

LLMs love clean question-and-answer content. Real FAQ sections — visible on the page and mirrored in FAQPage schema — give models quotable, attributable answers like "What services does the company offer?" and "Which markets does it serve?"

3. Publish an llms.txt

The llms.txt standard is a machine-readable summary of your site: who you are, what you do, canonical URLs, and how AI systems should cite you. Pair it with a fuller llms-full.txt for the complete picture.

4. Let AI crawlers in

Check your robots.txt explicitly allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, and PerplexityBot. If you block them, you opt out of AI recommendations entirely.

5. Build proof models can quote

Case studies with concrete numbers, named markets, and industries give LLMs the specifics they need to recommend you confidently — "they grew a UK taxi firm's bookings by X%" beats "results-driven agency."

6. Keep content fresh and discoverable

An RSS feed, a current sitemap, and regularly updated insights help retrieval systems find your latest material — which is what browsing-enabled models pull from.

GEO vs traditional SEO

| | Traditional SEO | GEO | |---|---|---| | Goal | Rank a blue link | Get cited in an answer | | Unit | Keyword / page | Entity / claim | | Wins with | Backlinks, content depth | Structured data, clarity, proof | | Measured by | Rankings, clicks | Mentions, citations, referrals |

They're complementary. Strong SEO feeds the retrieval layer GEO depends on.

What to do this quarter

1. Ship complete Organization + FAQPage schema.
2. Publish llms.txt and llms-full.txt.
3. Allow AI crawlers in robots.txt.
4. Add real, numeric proof to your key pages.
5. Keep a fresh feed of substantive content.

Resources

• SEO services — how we run technical SEO and GEO together.
• SEO technical audit checklist.

Get a free audit — we'll show you exactly where your AI and search visibility is leaking.