I pulled up our server logs: over the past two weeks the crawlers of ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity visited milcomp.hu several hundred times. They did not come out of curiosity, they came looking for sources for their answers. More and more buying decisions start with someone asking an AI instead of scrolling a results page, or reading the AI Overviews summary at the top of Google. These systems cite very few sources. If your company is not among them, your customer decides without you ever having come up. That is what GEO, generative engine optimization, is about: becoming a source the AI answers quote. You may also meet 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 optimization (a crawlable, fast, well-structured site and relevant content) there is no foundation for AI visibility either. The difference is the goal: in SEO you compete for a position on a list, in GEO you compete for the generated answer to cite YOU as its source. That takes a different way of writing, and a few technical conditions have to hold.

How AI systems choose

  • They must be able to reach your site. AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) are blocked in robots.txt on a surprising number of sites, often not deliberately but by a default setting. When I went through the 87 domains under our management, 35 had such a block, typically from a default rather than a decision.
  • They read server-rendered text. If your content only appears after JavaScript runs, most AI systems see an empty page. This affects a large share of small-business websites.
  • They quote facts, not marketing copy. Concrete numbers, definitions, comparisons and step-by-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, the chance of being treated as a source grows.

The technical basics: what to ask your developer for

  • robots.txt should allow the AI crawlers (a business decision, but if visibility is the goal, blocking is an own goal). Google's own documentation on AI features is explicit that its AI surfaces follow the normal crawling and snippet controls.
  • Server-side rendering or static generation: the full content should be in the HTML.
  • Structured data (schema.org): Organization, Service and Article markup with one consistent set of company facts.
  • On a multilingual site, correct hreflang, so the systems see the right language version.
  • llms.txt and an RSS feed: a machine-readable summary and a freshness signal, specifically for the crawlers.
  • Speed: a slow site gets crawled less often and less deeply.

Content that AI actually quotes

The most important principle: your own verifiable fact is worth more than any opinion. What works: precise definitions ("what is GEO"), claims backed by numbers, honest comparisons ("X or Y, and when"), step-by-step guides, and subheadings phrased as questions, because these systems answer questions. One topic per page, a clear heading hierarchy and short paragraphs that stand on their own all help extractability. And yes, writing honestly about who your product is NOT for works too; I think it is the strongest trust signal a page can send.

Our own example, with numbers

I applied this playbook to our own website first. After the August 2026 rewrite of milcomp.hu, the machine-crawlable text grew from 21,737 to 45,885 characters on the same number of pages, we render without client-side JavaScript, correct hreflang runs on 22 pages, and every page scores 100/100/100/100 in Google Lighthouse. This is not just an SEO result: these are exactly the properties that make a site readable for AI systems.

How to measure whether it works

AI visibility has no mature measurement tool yet the way classic rankings do. What I do: I regularly ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google (AI Overviews) the questions our customers actually ask, and record whether the company appears and what gets cited. I watch Search Console for brand and question-shaped queries. And in the traffic sources I watch the visitors arriving from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. The trend matters, not the one-off snapshot.

When GEO is not worth paying for

I will say it, because few people do: if the foundation is missing, money spent on GEO is wasted. It is not worth it if your site is three service descriptions and a contact page, because there is nothing to quote. It is not worth it if your customers do not research online, or if the site is about to be rebuilt anyway; build that first. In those cases the next step is content and fundamentals, not AI visibility. :)

When to bring in help

If the technical part (rendering, structured data, hreflang, speed) is not in order, no amount of content writing makes up for it. My order of work: first an AI visibility audit that shows what Google, ChatGPT and Perplexity see of you today, then prioritised technical fixes, and only on top of those a content plan. See our AI SEO and GEO service for the details, or request an audit. If you want to read more before deciding, our AI invoice processing article is a good example of the kind of content AI systems like to cite.