How to Show Up in ChatGPT & AI Search Results

When someone asks ChatGPT “who’s a good accountant for contractors in Bristol?”, the answer names three or four firms. Either you are one of them or you do not exist for that customer. This guide explains how the major AI assistants actually select sources, which optimisations have evidence behind them, and which are speculation dressed as strategy.

What GEO actually is

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making your business more likely to be retrieved, cited and recommended by AI assistants — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot. The term comes from a 2023 Princeton-led paper that tested which content changes measurably increased visibility in generated answers; adding statistics, quotations and citations to a page increased its visibility in generated responses by up to 40% in their benchmarks. GEO is young, but it is not guesswork.

The first thing to understand is that GEO is not a replacement discipline. Every major assistant retrieves from a web index before it writes a word — which means the work is mostly familiar.

How AI assistants choose their sources

None of these systems answer factual or commercial queries from training data alone. They use retrieval-augmented generation: fetch relevant pages from a search index, then compose an answer from them, citing some.

• ChatGPT uses Bing’s index for web search (plus its own OAI-SearchBot crawler). If you are invisible on Bing, you are invisible to ChatGPT’s search — and most UK small businesses have never once checked Bing.
• Perplexity runs its own crawler (PerplexityBot) and index, and cites sources inline for every claim it makes.
• Google AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google’s ordinary index and ranking systems. Pages that rank top-10 for a query are far more likely to be cited in the Overview above it.
• Microsoft Copilot is Bing again.

Two practical consequences. First, check that your site is indexed and healthy in both Google and Bing — Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free, and Bing can import your Search Console setup in one click. Second, make sure your robots.txt is not blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended; some firewall and CDN defaults block AI crawlers wholesale, which is a legitimate choice for a publisher and a self-inflicted wound for a business that wants referrals.

The content that wins citations

Language models compose answers from retrieved text, so they favour passages that can be lifted cleanly: a clear factual statement, a number, a definition, a direct answer to a question. Vague marketing copy gives a model nothing to quote.

Be specific and quotable

“We’re a leading provider of quality boiler services” is unciteable. “A new combi boiler installation in the UK typically costs £1,900–£3,000 including labour, and takes one to two days” is a sentence an assistant can quote with your business attached. Audit your key pages for liftable facts: prices or price ranges, timescales, processes, qualifications, dates founded, areas covered. The Princeton GEO research found exactly this — statistics and quotable statements — drove the largest visibility gains.

Answer questions in question format

A large share of AI queries are phrased as questions, and retrieval favours pages whose headings match. A genuine FAQ section — real questions customers ask, each answered in two to four plain sentences directly below the heading — is the single most reliable content format for AI citation. Put the answer first and the elaboration after; models routinely truncate.

Mark it up

Structured data (JSON-LD) states your facts unambiguously for machines: LocalBusiness or Organization schema for who and where you are, FAQPage for your questions, Product and Service with prices where applicable. Google has confirmed structured data helps its systems understand pages for AI features, and entity-resolution systems generally lean on it. It is also already standard SEO — covered in our local SEO checklist.

Entity consistency: be one thing everywhere

Assistants asked to recommend a business cross-reference what the wider web says about you. If your name, address, services and descriptions match across your website, Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Yell, Checkatrade, your Chamber of Commerce listing and your social profiles, you resolve to one confident entity. If they conflict, you are noise, and models do not cite noise. Third-party corroboration counts double here: reviews, directory listings and local press mentions are the evidence an assistant weighs when deciding whether “best roofer in York” includes you. This is one reason GEO and local SEO are nearly the same work under different names.

The llms.txt question, answered honestly

llms.txt is a proposed standard — a markdown file at your site root summarising your key pages for AI systems, analogous to robots.txt (proposal at llmstxt.org). The honest position as of mid-2026: no major AI provider has confirmed using it. Google’s John Mueller has said Google does not use it; OpenAI and Anthropic have not adopted it; server logs across large studies show negligible llms.txt fetches by AI crawlers. Adding one costs twenty minutes and carries no risk, so do it if you like being early. But anyone selling llms.txt as a critical AI visibility fix is selling the experimental as the essential.

Why traditional SEO is still most of the job

Every retrieval pipeline described above starts with a search index, so the things that earn search rankings — indexable pages, clear title tags, genuine expertise, links and mentions from other sites — are the same things that get you retrieved by AI. Multiple studies in 2025 found the majority of AI Overview citations come from pages ranking in Google’s top 10 for the query. There is no separate trick that makes a weak site visible to ChatGPT. The honest summary: GEO is roughly 80% the SEO you should already be doing, plus a 20% layer of quotability, structured data and entity hygiene. What changes most by sector is which questions to answer — our industry SEO guides map those.

What AI Overviews do to your traffic

The uncomfortable part. Ahrefs measured a 34.5% drop in click-through rate for the top organic result when an AI Overview appears, across 300,000 informational keywords; Pew Research found users clicked a result on just 8% of searches showing an AI summary, against 15% without. Informational queries — “how often should a boiler be serviced” — increasingly end on Google itself.

For small businesses the damage is real but uneven. Commercial and local queries — “boiler service near me”, “emergency electrician Sheffield” — still resolve to map packs, profiles and websites, because the searcher needs a business, not a paragraph. The strategy that follows: treat informational content as the way you get cited and remembered rather than clicked, and concentrate conversion effort on the commercial and local queries where clicks survive. Watch your own data in Search Console — falling CTR with stable impressions on informational queries is the AI Overview signature; our Search Console quick wins guide shows how to spot it.

The AI visibility checklist

1. Verify indexing in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. Confirm robots.txt and your CDN are not blocking OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Google-Extended.
3. Add LocalBusiness/Organization and FAQPage structured data, validated with the Rich Results Test.
4. Rewrite key pages to lead with specific, quotable facts: prices, timescales, credentials.
5. Build a genuine FAQ answering the questions customers actually phrase to assistants.
6. Align your name, services and descriptions across every profile and directory you appear on.
7. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google your own money questions monthly, and note who gets cited.
8. Optionally add llms.txt — cheap, harmless, unproven.

Most of this is checkable from data you already have, which is how Vantage approaches it: agents read your live Search Console queries to find the questions you nearly rank for, flag pages missing the structured data and quotable specifics that earn citations, and watch for the CTR patterns that signal AI Overviews absorbing your informational clicks.