GEO & AI Search
How to Get Your Business Cited by AI Search
8 min read
Buyers increasingly ask an AI assistant to shortlist options for them. Assistants do not browse the way people do — they retrieve, extract, and paraphrase. Optimising for that behaviour, often called generative engine optimisation, is now part of ordinary SEO work.
Answer the question in the first two sentences
Retrieval systems favour passages that resolve a question directly and immediately. Lead each page and section with a complete, self-contained answer, then expand. Long build-ups get skipped.
Publish facts a model can extract
Specific, checkable details — service areas, price ranges, turnaround times, materials, certifications, capacity — are what assistants quote. Vague marketing adjectives cannot be extracted or verified.
- State prices or ranges, timelines, and coverage areas in plain text
- Use FAQ blocks that mirror how customers phrase questions
- Keep a single canonical page per topic instead of near-duplicates
Give machines a structured version of the truth
Schema markup, a clean sitemap, semantic HTML headings, and an llms.txt file make it cheap for a crawler to build an accurate model of your business. Blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt guarantees you are absent from their answers.
Earn third-party mentions
Assistants weight consensus across sources. Directory listings, press coverage, podcast appearances, supplier pages, and reviews on independent platforms all raise the odds your name appears in a generated shortlist.
Track the new channel
Watch referral traffic from AI assistants, monitor branded search volume, and periodically ask the major assistants the questions your customers ask. Their answers are your new rank report.
