More and more people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini instead of searching, and Google answers with an AI Overview above the results, available in Ireland and eight other European countries since March 2025. Those answers cite a handful of websites as sources. GEO (generative engine optimization) is the work of making yours one of them.
SEO and GEO: same foundation, different goal
SEO aims to rank your page well in a list of results. GEO aims to have an assistant use you as a source and mention you in its answer. The good news is that both rest on the same foundation. Google says it plainly: there are no additional requirements or special optimizations to appear in its AI features; a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet in Search (Google Search Central). So be wary of anyone selling secret tricks.
What changes is the kind of content that gets cited: clear answers, specific facts with sources, and pages that are easy to read and understand, for a machine too.
What helps: the basics Google and OpenAI ask for, and good practice
1. Let them read you
- Allow crawling in your
robots.txtand at your hosting provider or CDN. To appear in ChatGPT search, OpenAI asks you to allow its OAI-SearchBot crawler: block it and your site will not appear in those answers (OpenAI). Another of its crawlers, GPTBot, is for training models, and you can decide on it separately. - Important content as text: not inside images, and not only in JavaScript the crawler does not run.
- Internal links, so every important page is easy to find.
- A good page experience: fast, stable and comfortable on mobile.
2. Help them understand you
- One page per topic, with a title that says exactly what it is about. Our service pages are an example: one for web design, another for apps and so on.
- Answer first, explain after. Google says you do not need to write in a special way for AI, but this makes the text easier to read and to cite. If someone asks “how long does a custom website take?”, the answer belongs in the first sentence of that section.
- Facts with linked sources, specific dates and comparison tables: that is what an assistant can safely cite.
- Structured data (schema.org) that matches what the page shows: who you are, what you offer and where you are. Google notes that they are not required for its AI features; if you use them, they must match the visible text.
3. Give them reasons to trust you
- A consistent identity: the same name, description and contact details on your website, your Google profile and your other profiles.
- Demonstrable experience: real projects, cases with results and the people behind them.
- Up-to-date content, with the review date in view.
What about llms.txt?
It is a proposal for summarising a website in a text file meant for language models. Google states that its Search does not use these files and that publishing one neither helps nor harms. We publish one because it costs little to maintain and some tools and agents use it, but it is not what makes the difference.
How to measure it
- In Search Console, the generative AI performance report (available to every website since 31 August 2026) shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode; that data also counts in the web search performance report.
- In your analytics, visits from assistants show up as referral traffic from their domains, such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai.
- And the most direct check: ask the assistants yourself every month about your sector and city, and note who gets cited.
How we do it at Vetro
Every website we build ships with the technical basis of GEO included: crawling allowed for search engines and assistants, real text in the HTML even when the site is in 3D, structured data that matches the page, one page per service, a sitemap with every language version and an llms.txt. The rest is useful content published steadily, like this blog.
Frequently asked questions
Does GEO replace SEO? No. AI answers rely heavily on well-made, well-ranked pages. Without an SEO foundation, GEO has nothing to build on.
Can you pay to be cited by an assistant? Citations inside an answer are not for sale: they are earned by being a clear, reliable source.
How long until it shows? It depends on how often your site is crawled and on the competition in your sector: usually weeks or months, not days.
Sources
- AI features and your website (Google Search Central).
- Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search (Google Search Central).
- Generative AI performance report (Search Console Help).
- Overview of OpenAI crawlers (OpenAI).
- AI Overviews expand to more countries in Europe (Google).
- The llms.txt proposal.
