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GEO: how to make your content easy for AI search to find and cite

How AI answers in Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Bing choose sources, and what you can control: crawl access, clear answers, structure and trust.

SEO2 min readUpdated

Key takeaways

  • AI search features still rely on crawlable, indexed web pages, so classic technical SEO comes first.
  • Pages that answer a question directly, near the top, in plain language are easier to quote.
  • Specific facts, sources, dates and named authors increase trust for people and machines.
  • Decide deliberately which AI crawlers may access your site via robots.txt. Blocking search crawlers can remove you from AI answers.
On this page
  1. What "GEO" means
  2. 1. Be crawlable and indexable
  3. 2. Decide which AI crawlers to allow
  4. 3. Answer the question early and plainly
  5. 4. Be specific and verifiable
  6. 5. Use structured data
  7. 6. Build genuine authority
  8. What about llms.txt?

What "GEO" means

Generative engine optimisation is the practice of making content easy for AI-powered search (Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Bing Copilot, ChatGPT search, Perplexity and similar) to retrieve, understand and cite. It is not a separate trick: these systems mostly draw on the same crawled and indexed web as traditional search, then summarise the pages they trust. Anyone promising guaranteed AI citations is guessing.

1. Be crawlable and indexable

Google states there are no special requirements to appear in its AI features beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet. So the basics matter most: fast pages, no accidental noindex, a clean XML sitemap, descriptive titles and internal links.

2. Decide which AI crawlers to allow

AI companies use different crawlers for training and for search. For example, OpenAI separates GPTBot (training) from OAI-SearchBot (search). Blocking training crawlers keeps your content out of model training; blocking search crawlers can keep you out of their answers. The robots.txt generator lists common agents so you can choose deliberately.

3. Answer the question early and plainly

AI summaries favour passages that answer a question completely in a few sentences. Put a direct answer near the top, then the detail. Use question-style headings that match how people ask ("How do I remove VAT from a total?"), short paragraphs, lists for steps and tables for comparisons.

4. Be specific and verifiable

Concrete numbers, worked examples, dates, named sources and clear authorship make content more useful and more likely to be cited. Vague, generic text written to hit keywords is what AI summaries replace, not what they quote.

5. Use structured data

Schema markup (Organization, Article, Product, FAQPage, Breadcrumb) states facts unambiguously. Generate it with the schema generator and keep it consistent with visible content.

6. Build genuine authority

Mentions and links from reputable sites, a consistent business profile across the web, and real reviews still signal trust. There is no shortcut. Content that people find useful enough to reference is what both search engines and AI systems reward.

What about llms.txt?

llms.txt is a proposed convention: a plain-text file that summarises a site for language models. Major search engines have not said they use it, so treat it as an inexpensive extra, not a ranking factor.

Sources

  1. Google Search Central: AI features and your websitedevelopers.google.com
  2. Google: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first contentdevelopers.google.com
  3. OpenAI: Overview of OpenAI crawlersdevelopers.openai.com
Written by the Toolkeel team at Sole Digital Media

Fact-checked against the sources above. We test every tool we mention. Editorial policy.

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