What is GEO? How to get your website cited by AI search engines
By FluxsStudio Team. Published , updated . 1 min read.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of structuring your website so AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews can understand it, trust it and cite it in their answers. Classic SEO gets you ranked in a list of links. GEO gets you quoted in the answer itself.
Why GEO matters now
A growing share of people ask an AI assistant instead of typing keywords into a search box. Those assistants still read the web, but they summarise it. If your site is slow to render, vague, or missing structure, you are simply left out of the summary.
What actually works
1. Answer-first content
Start each page with a direct, 40–60 word answer to the question the page targets. AI engines prefer passages that can be quoted without extra context.
2. Structured data
Add JSON-LD schema: Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article, BreadcrumbList. It removes ambiguity about who you are and what you offer.
3. Server-rendered HTML
Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript. If your content only appears after client-side rendering, they may see an empty page. Frameworks like Next.js render HTML on the server by default.
4. An llms.txt file
/llms.txt is a plain Markdown summary of your site written for language models: who you are, what you offer and links to your most important pages.
5. Let the crawlers in
Check your robots.txt. Bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot need to be allowed if you want to be cited.
6. Concrete, checkable facts
Numbers, timelines, prices, names and dates get cited. Marketing fluff does not.
The short version
GEO is not a replacement for SEO. It is SEO done with a clearer structure and more specific content. Every site FluxsStudio builds ships with both.
Questions people ask
GEO is the practice of structuring a website so AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews can understand it, trust it and cite it in their answers.
GEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it. Both need fast, crawlable pages and clear content. GEO puts extra weight on answer-first writing, structured data, specific facts and letting AI crawlers in.
llms.txt is a plain Markdown file at the root of a website that summarises who you are, what you offer and links to your key pages, written for language models to read.