GEO: Getting Your Business Found by AI Assistants

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the work of preparing your company's information so that artificial intelligence assistants —ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, or Google's AI summaries— understand it, cite it, and recommend it when someone asks them a question. It doesn't replace SEO: it builds on it, because those assistants read the indexed web, but the goal is different. Instead of fighting for a spot on a list of ten blue links, you're trying to be the source the AI uses to put its answer together. And unlike classic SEO, nobody can guarantee you'll get mentioned: you can influence the odds, not the outcome of any single conversation.

What changes when a customer asks an AI assistant instead of searching Google

Picture someone who needs an accountant for a pyme (small or mid-sized business) in Heredia. Five years ago they would type "accountant small business Heredia" into Google, see a list of links, and click on three or four. Today that same person might open ChatGPT and write: "I own a small business with 8 employees in Heredia, I need someone to handle my accounting and payroll. What are my options and what should I ask before hiring?"

Three things change fundamentally:

The question is longer and more specific. Nobody talks to an assistant using two loose words. They explain their situation. That means content that answers concrete, situation-specific questions has a better chance of being useful than content that repeats a generic keyword.
There's only one answer. Instead of ten options, the user gets a paragraph with two or three recommendations and a few citations. Sitting at position 7 on Google no longer counts as "being visible": either they mention you, or you don't exist in that conversation.
The user may never visit your site. They might decide to contact you directly using the phone number the AI gave them, or they might keep the answer and never click on anything. Your analytics won't show that visit, but the sale can still come through.

How GEO resembles the SEO you were already doing

Much more than it sounds. Assistants don't invent information about your business: they pull it from the web. ChatGPT and Copilot rely on Bing's index to search; Gemini and Google's AI summaries rely on Google's index; Perplexity combines several sources. If your site isn't indexed, GEO isn't possible.

So the fundamentals stay the same: the site should load fast, be readable on a phone, have original content rather than copied content, have clear page titles, and get links and mentions from other sites. A site that doesn't show up on Google today won't show up in ChatGPT either. GEO isn't a side door that lets you skip the underlying work.

How GEO differs from traditional SEO

The practical differences show up in the format and in the kind of content AI prefers to cite:

The answer comes first. A model building a summary needs a self-contained passage that answers the question in two or three sentences. If your page opens with "In today's world, more and more companies…", there's nothing to extract. If it opens with "The deadline to appeal an award in SICOP (Costa Rica's public procurement system) is X business days counted from…", there is.
Consistency across sources matters. If your address, phone number, or line of business appears differently on your site, your Google listing, your LinkedIn, and some old directory, the AI has less confidence in the data. Unifying that information is GEO work.
Mentions count as much as links. Being named in an article from a local outlet, in a forum, in a supplier directory, or in a detailed review gives the model material to associate you with a topic, even without a link.
Structured data helps remove ambiguity. Using schema.org to mark up who you are, what you sell, where you are, and what you charge reduces the chance that the AI confuses you with another company with a similar name.
AI crawler access is configured separately. The assistants' bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, among others) are controlled through the robots.txt file, independently of Googlebot. Many sites have them blocked without knowing it, because they came blocked by default in the template or in the security plugin.

Four checks you can run today in twenty minutes

Before hiring anyone, find out where you stand:

Ask the AI about yourself. Open ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity and type three questions a real customer would ask: "who sells X in Costa Rica?", "what's a good X company for a small business?", "compare the X options in San José for me." Write down whether you show up, who gets mentioned instead of you, and where the data comes from. Ask the same question again in a new window: you'll see the answer change. That's normal, and it's part of the point.
Check your robots.txt. Go to yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for lines that say Disallow under agents like GPTBot or Google-Extended. If you have them blocked, you're explicitly asking them not to read you.
Confirm that you're in Bing. Search for site:yoursite.com on Bing, not just on Google. If Bing doesn't have your pages, ChatGPT will have a hard time finding you. Signing up for Bing Webmaster Tools is free and takes a few minutes.
Look at your page without JavaScript. If your content loads via JavaScript, it may be invisible to some crawlers. A quick test: in your browser, choose "view page source" and use Ctrl+F to look for a phrase from your main text. If it doesn't appear in the source, several bots probably can't see it either.

What you can really influence and what you can't

What is in your hands: making the site accessible to crawlers, making each page answer a concrete question from the first paragraph, keeping your contact details and services identical everywhere, publishing information that doesn't exist in the same form on another site (reference prices, real timelines, cases, step-by-step procedures), and earning mentions from sources the AI already considers trustworthy.

What isn't in your hands: which model the assistant uses that week, how it weighs its sources, whether it decides to cite you or just summarize, and whether the model version has up-to-date knowledge of your industry. Two users asking the same question can get different answers, and the same question asked today and a month from now can produce different results without you changing anything. Anyone promising you'll "always appear in ChatGPT" is selling something they can't deliver.

How long it takes to see results

There are two different timelines. The technical one is short: unblocking crawlers, fixing inconsistent data, or adding structured data can show up within weeks, as soon as search engines crawl the site again. The content and reputation one is long: for a model to associate your brand with a topic, there has to be enough published material and enough external mentions, and that gets built over months, not days.

How to measure whether AI is citing you

There's been an important development here, and it's worth separating two worlds. On Google's side, official reporting now exists: Google announced performance reports for generative experiences in Search Console, so you can see data on that traffic instead of having to guess at it. The announcement is on the Google Search Central blog, and the exact scope of each metric —what counts as an impression, what counts as a click, and how it's grouped with the rest of Search— is explained in the performance report documentation. It's worth reading that page before drawing conclusions, because the way the data is grouped changes the interpretation quite a bit. And since this area moves often, it's a good idea to check Google Search news from time to time instead of trusting an article written a year ago.

On the other side are ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and Claude, which don't give you any equivalent dashboard. There, measurement is still a manual craft, and there's no way around it: build a list of twenty questions your customers actually ask, run them once a month in each assistant, and record in a spreadsheet whether you show up, how they describe you, and which sources they cite. It's manual and imperfect —answers vary between sessions— but it's the only honest record of progress you'll have outside Google. If you see that they describe you incorrectly or credit you with services you don't offer, check which page the AI is reading: the problem is almost always on your own site or in an outdated directory.

Where to start if you're short on time

Unblock AI crawlers in robots.txt, unless you have a specific reason not to.
Register the site in Bing Webmaster Tools in addition to Google Search Console.
Review the performance reports in Search Console, including what it reports on AI experiences, to get a baseline before you change anything.
Rewrite the first paragraph of your five most important pages so they answer the question in the title in a self-contained way.
Unify your name, address, phone number, and service description across your site, your Google Business Profile listing, and your social media.
Publish a frequently asked questions page with real, specific answers for your industry, not generic ones.

None of this is a new trick: it's the same work of making your information clear, accessible, and verifiable, done with the understanding that the first reader may be a machine that will then relay it to a customer. If you'd rather not handle it yourself, at SEOsmart we work on exactly that —the technical foundation, content that answers real questions, and monthly tracking of what the assistants say about your company— with the same honesty about timelines you just read here: things can improve quite a bit, but nobody can guarantee you a mention.

This guide is general information. Timelines, costs and requirements can change; for a specific case, review it with the right person before deciding.