GEO: How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT & Co.

When someone asks ChatGPT for “a good physiotherapist near the station” or asks Perplexity which roofer to call, the answer comes from somewhere: usually from the handful of local websites the assistant could actually fetch, read and understand. Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the craft of making your site one of them. Think of it as SEO’s successor discipline: instead of ranking in a list of blue links, you want to be the business the answer names.

What generative engine optimization actually is

Classic SEO optimizes for a results page; GEO optimizes for an answer. ChatGPT’s search mode, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews all work the same way at heart: they fetch a few pages, read them, and compose a recommendation with sources. That changes the game in one important way. There is no page two. If your site can’t be fetched, can’t be parsed, or doesn’t contain a clear answer, you’re not ranked lower; you’re simply not in the pool.

Why local businesses should care now

A growing share of “who should I hire” questions never reaches a classic results page anymore. People ask an assistant and act on the one or two names it returns. For local services that’s brutal math: an AI answer might name two plumbers where a search page listed ten. The upside: most local websites have done nothing about this yet, so the bar is unusually low. Four levers cover most of what matters.

Lever 1: Allow AI search crawlers in robots.txt

AI assistants use their own crawlers, and plenty of sites block them by accident, usually through a blanket “block all AI” rule a plugin or an agency added. Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for the search-side crawlers: OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User (ChatGPT), PerplexityBot (Perplexity) and Claude-SearchBot (Claude). If any of them is disallowed, that assistant cannot read or cite your site, full stop. Blocking training crawlers like GPTBot is a separate, legitimate decision that doesn’t affect visibility; just don’t let one rule sweep both groups away.

Lever 2: Add schema.org structured data

JSON-LD markup is the closest thing to speaking the machines’ native language. For a local business the LocalBusiness type (or a subtype like Dentist, Plumber or Restaurant) matters most: name, address, phone, opening hours, services and price range in one machine-readable block. Assistants use it to confirm you’re a real business in a specific place, exactly what a “near me” answer needs. It’s a one-off job for a developer, invisible to human visitors, and one of the highest-leverage hours you can spend on your site.

Lever 3: Write answer-ready content

AI answers are stitched together from pages that already contain answers. A homepage that’s one big brand collage gives a model nothing to quote. Three practical fixes:

• Add an FAQ section built from real customer questions (“Do you handle emergency repairs?”, “What does a first appointment cost?”), each with a direct answer.
• Use question-shaped headings on service pages, with a two-or-three-sentence answer immediately below.
• State concrete facts a model can repeat: prices or ranges, service area, response times, certifications, years in business.

Lever 4: Serve server-rendered, readable HTML

Most AI crawlers don’t execute JavaScript. If your site is a JavaScript app that assembles its content in the browser, an AI crawler often sees a nearly empty page. You stay invisible even with crawlers allowed and schema in place. The test takes a minute: open your page’s source code (view source, not the inspector) and search for your opening hours or a service name. If it isn’t in the raw HTML, it doesn’t exist for most machines.

Where to start

Work the levers in order. Crawler access is a five-minute robots.txt check, structured data is an afternoon, answer-ready content is a habit you build page by page, and rendering is only a project if you fail the view-source test. Most local sites capture the bulk of the value from the first two levers alone. And if you pitch website work to local businesses, every one of these gaps is a concrete, verifiable opening line.

Check your site in 10 seconds

The free ScanToPitch AI Visibility Check at scantopitch.com/audit runs exactly these checks instantly (crawler access, structured data, answer-readiness and rendering), no signup needed.