How to get your startup cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews

A plain-English guide to generative engine optimisation (GEO): what AI search engines look for, how to make your site readable to them, and how to write content they cite.

By Prathmesh Soni. Published .

Key takeaways

  • AI search tools can only cite pages they can read. Many AI crawlers do not run JavaScript, so a client-rendered site can look empty to them.
  • Research from Princeton and others found that adding quotations, statistics and cited sources made content noticeably more visible in AI-generated answers.
  • Write answer-first: put a clear, direct answer near the top, use question-style headings, and keep facts specific and sourced.

What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

Generative engine optimisation is the practice of making your content easy for AI search tools to find, understand and cite. Where traditional SEO aims for a high position in a list of links, GEO aims for your company or page to be named inside the answer that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude or Google’s AI Overviews generate.

The term comes from a 2023 research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues (Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi), later presented at KDD 2024. They tested how different content changes affected how often a source appeared in AI answers.

Can AI search engines actually read your website?

This is the first thing to check, and it is often the biggest problem. Many AI crawlers, including those used by OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, fetch the raw HTML of a page and generally do not execute JavaScript. If your site is a single-page app that builds its content in the browser, those crawlers may see little more than an empty container.

  • Use server-side rendering or prerendering so every important page ships its text in the HTML.
  • Make sure robots.txt does not block the crawlers you want, such as OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
  • Put structured data (JSON-LD) in the HTML itself, not only injected by JavaScript.
  • Test by fetching a page with a tool like curl and reading what comes back.

What kind of content gets cited?

In the GEO paper, the strongest improvements came from adding quotations from relevant sources, adding statistics, and citing sources, with reported visibility gains of up to about 40% on the authors’ benchmark. Keyword stuffing did not help. In practice, that means writing like a good reference: specific, attributed and easy to quote.

  • Answer the question in the first few sentences, then explain.
  • Use headings phrased as the questions people actually ask.
  • Include real numbers with their source, and quotes with a named person.
  • Add a short FAQ to pages where people have follow-up questions.
  • Show who wrote the page and when it was last updated.

Does llms.txt help?

An llms.txt file is a short, plain-text summary of your site for AI tools. It is cheap to add, but as of 2026 there is little evidence that major AI search products rely on it. Treat it as a nice extra, not a substitute for readable pages and good content.

How do you measure whether GEO is working?

Rank tracking does not capture AI answers well. A simple method is to keep a list of the questions your buyers ask, run them regularly in the main AI tools, and record whether your company is mentioned or linked. Because answers vary, run each question more than once and look at the trend over weeks rather than a single result.

Frequently asked questions

Is GEO different from SEO?

They overlap heavily. Good SEO (crawlable pages, clear structure, helpful content) is the foundation. GEO adds a focus on being quotable and on making sure AI crawlers can read your pages.

Should I block AI crawlers?

Only if you do not want to appear in AI answers. Blocking search-focused crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot or PerplexityBot generally means those tools cannot cite you.

How long does it take to see results?

Technical fixes can take effect as soon as pages are recrawled. Content and authority improvements usually take longer, so measure over weeks and months.