AI search visibility is about being found and cited in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews. No one controls those answers, but clear facts and structured content improve your odds.
More people now ask an AI tool for a recommendation instead of scrolling through search results. Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of making your business easy for those tools to find, understand and cite. It builds on SEO and does not replace it.
How AI tools choose what to mention
Different tools work differently, and the details change often. In general they combine what they learned in training with live information from the web. They tend to use pages that are easy to crawl, clearly written and supported by other sources that say the same thing.
Practical steps
- Make your facts consistent. Use the same business name, address, phone number, services and founder details on your site, your Google profile and your social profiles.
- Write answer-first pages. Start each page with a plain sentence that says what the service is, who it is for and where you offer it. Then add detail.
- Add an FAQ. Answer the real questions customers ask, and mark them up with FAQ structured data.
- Use structured data. Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, Article and Breadcrumb markup help machines read your pages without guessing.
- Earn outside mentions. Directories, partner sites and local press that describe you the same way increase trust in your details.
- Allow crawling. Do not block search and AI bots in robots.txt unless you have a reason, and keep an up-to-date sitemap.
- Test your own prompts. Ask the tools the questions your customers ask and note whether you appear and whether the facts are right.
What about llms.txt?
An llms.txt file is a short text summary of your site for language models. It is an informal proposal, not an official standard, and major search engines have not confirmed that it affects ranking. It is cheap to add, so we include one, but we do not rely on it.
Be realistic
Nobody can guarantee that an AI tool will recommend your business. What you can do is remove the reasons it would skip you. Our AI search visibility service covers the entity clean-up, schema, content and prompt testing described above.