More and more buying decisions now start with somebody asking ChatGPT or Perplexity, or reading the AI Overviews summary at the top of a Google results page, rather than scrolling the classic list of links. These systems cite few sources, and if your company is not among them, your prospect decides without you ever being considered. That is what GEO - generative engine optimization - is about: becoming a source that AI answers quote. You will also see the term AEO, answer engine optimization; in practice the two mean the same thing.

How is it different from SEO?

GEO does not replace SEO, it builds on it. Without classic search optimisation - a crawlable, fast, well-structured site with relevant content - AI visibility has no foundation. The difference is the goal: in SEO you compete for a position in a list, in GEO you compete to be the source the generated answer CITES. That takes a different way of writing, and a few technical conditions have to hold.

How AI systems choose

  • They have to be able to reach your site. AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) are blocked in robots.txt on a great many sites, often not deliberately but through a default setting nobody revisited.
  • They read server-rendered text. If your content only appears after JavaScript has run, most AI systems see an empty page.
  • They quote facts, not marketing copy. Specific numbers, definitions, comparisons and step lists make it into answers. "Market-leading, customer-centric solutions" never does.
  • They look for consensus. If consistent information about your company and your field appears in several independent places, your chance of being treated as a source goes up.

The technical basics: what to ask your developer for

  • robots.txt should allow the AI crawlers. That is a business decision, but if visibility is the goal, blocking them is an own goal.
  • Server-side rendering or static generation: the full content must be in the HTML.
  • Structured data (schema.org): Organization, Service and Article markup with single, consistent company details.
  • On a multilingual site, correct hreflang, so the systems see the right language version.
  • llms.txt: a machine-readable summary of the site's content, written specifically for AI systems.
  • Speed: a slow site is crawled less often and less deeply.

Content that AI actually quotes

The most important principle: a verifiable fact of your own is worth more than any opinion. What works: precise definitions, claims backed by numbers, honest comparisons ("X or Y, and when to pick which"), price ranges, step-by-step guides, and subheadings phrased as questions - because the model is answering a question. One topic per page, a clear heading hierarchy, and concise paragraphs that make sense on their own all help a passage be liftable.

Our own example, with numbers

We put this into practice on our own site. After the August 2026 rewrite of milcomp.hu the machine-readable text grew from 21,737 characters to 45,885 characters across the same number of pages, we render without client-side JavaScript, hreflang is correct across the site, and every page reaches a 100/100/100/100 Google Lighthouse score. That is not only an SEO result: those are precisely the properties that make a site readable to AI systems.

How to measure whether it works

AI visibility has no mature measurement tool yet in the way search rankings do. What is worth doing: put your most important customer questions to ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google (AI Overviews) on a regular schedule and record whether your company appears and what is cited; watch Search Console for impressions on brand and question-shaped queries; and look for chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai in your referrers. The trend is what matters, not a single snapshot.

When to bring in help

If the technical half - rendering, structured data, hreflang, speed - is not in order, no amount of content writing will make up for it. Our order of work is: an AI visibility audit first, showing what Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity see of you today, then prioritised technical fixes, and only then a content plan. For details see our AI SEO and GEO service, or ask for an audit.