Quick answer
AI assistants recommend businesses they can clearly understand and verify. To be included, publish clear answer-first content about your services and service areas, keep your business details consistent across the web, earn genuine reviews and mentions, add structured data, and make sure AI crawlers can access your site. No one can guarantee an AI citation, but these steps make you a far stronger candidate.
More customers now ask Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Perplexity questions like “who’s a good web designer near Maitland?”. These tools summarise the web and name a handful of businesses. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of becoming one of them.
How AI assistants choose businesses
- Clarity: can the AI tell exactly what you do, where and for whom?
- Consistency: do your details match across your website, Google and directories?
- Corroboration: do reviews, articles and other sites mention you?
- Accessibility: can AI crawlers actually read your pages?
1. Write answer-first content
Start key pages with a short, direct answer to the question a customer would ask, then expand. For example: “A small-business website in the Hunter typically takes three to six weeks to build…”. This format is easy for both people and AI to quote.
2. Use structured data
Schema markup — Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ and Breadcrumb — tells machines precisely what each page is about. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but it removes ambiguity.
3. Let the right crawlers in
Check your robots.txt isn’t blocking search and AI crawlers you want to be found by, and publish an llms.txt file summarising your business, services and key pages.
4. Build genuine mentions
Local news coverage, industry associations, partner websites and detailed customer reviews all act as third-party evidence that you are who you say you are.
Tip: Ask ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode what they know about your business today. Note what’s wrong or missing — that’s your content to-do list.
What GEO can’t do
AI answers vary by person, location and wording, and they change often. Treat AI visibility as a bonus on top of solid local SEO and a website that converts — not a replacement for them.
