What is GEO? How to make your website visible in AI search

More people now ask an AI assistant a question instead of typing it into a search box. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google's AI Overviews all produce a written answer, and some of them name the websites they used.

Generative engine optimization, usually shortened to GEO (and sometimes called AIO, for AI optimization), is the work of making your website a source those systems can understand, trust and quote correctly.

How AI answers are different from search results

A search engine returns a ranked list of links and lets the reader choose. An AI assistant reads many pages, combines them and writes one answer. That changes what matters: a page can be perfectly optimized for a keyword and still be ignored if the model cannot tell who wrote it, what it claims or whether it is reliable.

What GEO actually involves

• Technical SEO as the foundation: crawlable pages, clean URLs, canonical tags, a sitemap, fast loading and no content hidden behind scripts that crawlers cannot run.
• Clear entities: who you are, where you are based, what you do and for whom, stated consistently on your site and your public profiles.
• Direct answers: a short, self-contained answer near the top of a page, followed by detail, so a model can quote it without distortion.
• Structured data: JSON-LD for Person, Organization or ProfessionalService, Service, FAQPage, Article and BreadcrumbList that matches what is visible on the page.
• Trust signals: a real author, dates that show when a page was last updated, links to verifiable work, and no invented statistics or reviews.
• Crawler access: letting search-oriented AI crawlers fetch your pages, while making your own decision about training crawlers.

Write for questions people actually ask

People ask assistants full questions: how do I hire a web developer in Bangladesh, what does a WooCommerce store cost, which tracking setup works for my store. Pages that name the question and answer it plainly are easier to use than pages that circle around a keyword.

That is why this site has guide pages on hiring a developer and on cost, and why each service page opens with a short answer block before the detail.

What about llms.txt?

An llms.txt file is a plain-text summary of a site, written for language models, placed at the root of the domain. It is cheap to publish and harmless, and it forces you to state clearly who you are and what the key pages are.

It is worth being honest about its limits: there is no published guarantee that any major assistant relies on it. Treat it as a tidy summary, not a ranking lever.

What is still unproven

The industry is young and a lot of GEO advice is guesswork presented as fact. Nobody outside these companies knows exactly how sources are selected, and behaviour changes between models and over time. Be sceptical of anyone selling guaranteed placement in AI answers.

What is reasonable to say is narrower: pages that are crawlable, specific, well structured, current and honest are easier for any system to use, and they are also better for human visitors. That makes the work worthwhile whether or not a given assistant cites you.

A practical starting checklist

• Make sure every important page is reachable by plain links and renders its text in the HTML.
• Give every page a unique title, description and canonical URL.
• Add a one-paragraph direct answer to the top of key pages.
• Add structured data that matches visible content, and validate it.
• Show an author and a last-updated date on guides and articles.
• Keep your name, location and services consistent across your site, LinkedIn, GitHub and other profiles.
• Publish pages that answer real customer questions, not just keyword variations.

If you want this implemented on a WordPress, WooCommerce or Next.js site, that is part of my technical SEO service, built directly into the code rather than layered on afterwards.