How to show up in AI search: GEO for normal businesses

Every few weeks a client asks me how to show up when someone asks ChatGPT, which is the question generative engine optimisation tries to answer. It's a fair thing to worry about. Google lists over 200 countries and territories where AI Overviews are available, and the UK is on the list of places where AI Mode is available. Assistants like ChatGPT also send a small but growing share of visits to websites.

Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, has gathered a crowd of tools, consultants and confident predictions very quickly. Some of it is real. A fair amount is ordinary SEO with a new label. This guide separates the two for businesses that don't have time to follow the debate.

How AI answers get built

Most AI answers aren't recalled from a model's memory. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode a question with any commercial or current angle, and the system runs searches against a web index. It fetches a handful of pages and writes its answer from what it found, citing some of the sources as it goes. Google says its AI features may use query fan-out, issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources.

In short, an assistant can only cite what it can find. Your site might be slow to respond, block AI crawlers (the programs that fetch and read pages), or hide its content behind scripts that never load for bots. It might not rank anywhere for the underlying searches. In any of those cases you're not among the pages it can pick from, and no AI-specific trick fixes that. This site is built the way I'd build yours, with all its copy in the plain HTML so a crawler can read it even with JavaScript switched off.

That's why so much of GEO turns out to be technical SEO under a different name. Pages search engines can read, sensible structure, fast responses and content that answers the question were the entry requirements for Google. They're the entry requirements here too.

What carries over from SEO directly

If your site is already in good shape for search, you've done most of the work. Google's own guidance says the best practices for SEO remain relevant for AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode. The foundations carry over almost one for one.

• A clean structure that search engines can read.
• Schema markup, the code that tells machines what each page describes.
• Pages organised around real questions.
• Expertise shown on the page rather than claimed.

These are the things I'd check first in any SEO engagement, and they're what AI systems rely on when deciding which pages to pull. On a UK Shopify store I work on, 438 of the 1,000 searches Search Console lists for the store now rank in Google's top ten, 143 of them in the top three. I don't have a client result for AI citations to show you yet, and I won't claim one. Ranking for the searches behind a question is what puts a page within an assistant's reach.

How you lay out the answer matters a little more than it used to. Assistants lift out passages, so a page that states its answer plainly near the top gives the system something to quote. It helps if the heading above matches how people ask the question. Burying the answer under six paragraphs of preamble was always bad writing. Now it also makes you harder to cite.

What's new

Two things stand out as new rather than renamed.

The first is that your presence beyond your own site matters more. When someone asks "who's the best X in Y", assistants read comparison articles, reviews, forums and directories, and they weigh what third parties say about you. Business buyers do the same when they ask for a supplier shortlist, which my B2B SEO page covers. A brand that only exists on its own website gives an assistant very little to back up its claims. For a local business that mostly means a well-kept Google Business Profile and a steady flow of real Google reviews. On your own site, reviews and buying guides are the kinds of page assistants tend to cite.

The second is the shape of demand. AI referral traffic is still a very small part of most sites' visits. SE Ranking's study of 101,574 websites, tracked from January 2025 to April 2026, put AI platforms at 0.32% of all website traffic in 2026, up from 0.24% in 2025. So the trend is upward, but the volumes are tiny. My view is that the visitors it does send are worth watching, because an assistant has often described you to them before they click. The numbers still don't justify panic.

The llms.txt question

Sooner or later someone will pitch you llms.txt. It's a proposed standard where you publish a short summary of your site for AI systems. In May 2026, Ahrefs looked at the llms.txt files in its sample of 137,000 sites and found 97% of them received no requests at all. Google's guidance on AI features says you don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in them. It costs little to add, which is why this site has one, generated from the site's own data. I wouldn't sell you one as a strategy, though.

Where I'd spend the effort

Here is how the common tactics sort out, judged on whether they're worth the time.

Tactic	Verdict	Why
Fixing technical foundations	Do it	AI systems can't cite pages their crawlers can't fetch and load
Direct answers under question-shaped headings	Do it	Passages that can be lifted out are what get quoted
Schema markup	Do it	Cheap, stable, helps machines read what your pages are
Earning third-party mentions and reviews	Do it	Assistants check across sources before recommending
Tracking AI referrals in analytics	Do it	Small numbers, but you want the trend line
llms.txt	Optional	Barely anything reads it; fine to add, wrong to rely on
Blocking AI crawlers	Avoid	Removes you from answers entirely, which is rarely the goal
Dedicated GEO tool subscriptions	Wait	Most repackage rank tracking; the field is moving too fast to lock in

It's worth flagging that blocking has a real business case for publishers whose content is the product. On 3 June 2026 the CMA, the UK competition regulator, imposed a conduct requirement on Google. It means publishers will be able to opt out of their content being used to power AI features in Google search. Google has nine months to make all the changes, which takes it to early March 2027. The CMA expects important parts of the controls to reach publishers well before that deadline. Once they ship, check what they do to your normal search visibility before you use them. For a service business trying to be found, though, opting out of AI answers means giving up a growing source of customers.

Measurement is less settled than any of us would like. Assistants don't report how often they show you. So you watch referral traffic in GA4 (Google Analytics 4, Google's free website analytics) from sites like chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. For clients I set up GA4 to separate those visits, and I put the same buyer questions to the assistants each month. You also accept that some influence never shows up in analytics at all. Google does say sites appearing in its AI features are included in the overall search traffic in Search Console, in the Performance report under the "Web" search type. Checking how a site shows up across the major assistants is now a standard part of my SEO audits.

Generative engine optimisation FAQs

Is GEO different from SEO?

Mostly no. The systems behind AI answers rely on the same basics as search engines, so strong SEO gets you most of the way. The new parts are the extra weight given to third-party mentions and the premium on answers that can be quoted directly. Treat GEO as an extension of your SEO work and keep the same foundations underneath it.

Should I block AI crawlers from my site?

If you sell products or services, almost certainly not, because blocking removes you from the answers your buyers are reading. The sums differ for publishers whose content is the product. The CMA's June 2026 conduct requirement means UK publishers should get a proper opt-out from Google's AI features. Google has until early March 2027 to deliver it, and the CMA expects important parts sooner.

Does llms.txt improve AI visibility?

There's no evidence it does. In May 2026, Ahrefs found 97% of the files it checked got no requests, and Google says you don't need AI text files to appear in its AI features. Adding one costs little, but spend your real effort on content and technical foundations.

How do I measure AI search visibility?

Watch referral traffic from assistant sites in your analytics. Every so often, ask the major assistants the questions your buyers ask. Note whether you're mentioned, how you're described and who appears instead of you. It's manual and imperfect, but it tells you more than any dashboard currently can.