SEO and GEO: how your business gets found in Google and in AI search engines

Customers search differently than five years ago. Alongside Google they ask ChatGPT or Perplexity — and those give one answer with a handful of sources, not ten blue links. Findability in 2026 therefore consists of two disciplines: classic SEO (search engine optimisation) and GEO — generative engine optimization: making sure AI systems know and cite your business. The good news: both stand on the same foundation.

What is GEO — and why now?

GEO means optimising your website so that generative search engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — find, understand and cite your content as a source. Where SEO fights for a position in a list, GEO fights for a place inside the answer. Whoever is not there does not exist for that searcher. And since these systems draw their knowledge from crawled web pages, GEO starts with your website.

The technical base: one foundation for Google and AI

• Speed and clean HTML — Core Web Vitals in order, content in the HTML itself (not loaded in later by JavaScript), a clear heading structure H1→H2→H3.
• Structured data (JSON-LD) — tell machines explicitly what your business is, what it offers and what each page covers. Machines dislike guessing.
• Hreflang and canonicals — on multilingual sites every language version must be linked correctly, or your own pages compete with each other.
• A sitemap with fresh lastmod dates — so crawlers know what is new.

How does your business get into ChatGPT?

Three concrete steps that are usually forgotten:

• Let AI crawlers in — bots like GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot respect robots.txt. Whoever blocks them (many default configurations do) is invisible to AI search engines.
• Make sure Bing knows you — ChatGPT's search leans on the Bing index. Bing Webmaster Tools plus IndexNow (submitting new pages immediately) is therefore not a side note but a main act.
• Publish an llms.txt — an emerging convention: one file that tells AI systems in plain language what your site is and where the key pages live.

Content that AIs cite

Generative search engines prefer to cite pages that answer a question directly: a heading that poses the question, a first paragraph that answers it, then the depth. Concrete and verifiable beats vague and salesy — name methods, terms and prices explicitly. Freshness counts too: a page with a current date and accurate facts gets cited sooner than a time capsule from 2019.

What we build in as standard

Every website we build ships with this foundation from day one: full JSON-LD structured data, hreflang across all language versions, per-language metadata that matches the content, a sitemap with lastmod, a robots.txt that welcomes AI crawlers, llms.txt and an IndexNow submission with every publication. No bolt-on "SEO module" afterwards — it lives in the architecture. See our websites page for how that looks, and this article for what else a modern site must do.

Measuring: how do you know it works?

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools show which queries you appear for and where the clicks are. AI traffic shows up in your analytics as referrals from chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai. Expect build-up over weeks to months, not days — anyone promising otherwise is selling air.

Curious where your site stands today? The free scan checks your website's technical SEO base live and names concretely what there is to win.