GEO: how to rank your website in AI search engines (and why SEO is no longer enough)

More and more people ask ChatGPT or read Google's AI answer instead of clicking. GEO is the discipline that gets those AIs to recommend you. Here's what it is and where to start.

Two years ago, when someone in Mallorca looked for the “best web design agency”, they typed that into Google and chose between ten blue links. Today, a growing share of those people ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity directly — and get a single answer, in prose, with two or three recommended businesses. If your site isn't one of them, they never see you. And it isn't only agencies: it happens with “which restaurant to book in Sóller for a special dinner”, “a physiotherapist in Palma who speaks English” or “a reliable renovation company in Manacor”. People no longer compare ten websites; they read what the machine summarises for them.

What GEO is and how it differs from SEO

We call this new discipline GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. It doesn't replace SEO; it extends it. Classic SEO fights to appear in a list of results. GEO fights to make the AI understand you, trust you and cite you when someone asks a relevant question.

The two share almost all of their foundations: a website that can be crawled and indexed properly, useful content and authority. What changes is how success is measured and a few details of how you write. In SEO you care about position and clicks; in GEO you care about whether you're named inside the answer, how the AI describes you and which page it links to. We go into it more calmly in what changes between SEO and GEO for your website, but the short version is this: if your SEO is poor, GEO won't fix it; if your SEO is sound, GEO is the logical next step.

Why search engines have gone from giving links to giving answers

The underlying shift is this: the search engine has gone from giving you links to giving you an answer. Google calls it AI Overviews; ChatGPT and Perplexity do it by default. In every case, the model reads web pages, synthesises them and decides who to mention. Your goal stops being just “rank first” and becomes “be the source the AI picks to answer”.

For the user it's wonderfully convenient: they ask the way they'd ask a person, with all the nuances — “suitable for children”, “open on Sundays”, “where they speak German” — and receive a recommendation that has already been filtered. For the business it means the competition is no longer for ten slots on a page, but for two or three mentions inside a paragraph. And those mentions can't be bought with ads: they're earned with what the AI has been able to read about you, on your website and beyond it.

What AIs reward when they choose who to cite

And how do you get there? Luckily, not with strange tricks. AIs reward exactly what a good reader would: clear content that answers the question directly, that demonstrates real experience and that's easy to quote. A page that opens with the answer and then develops it has far better odds of being cited than one that meanders for six paragraphs.

In practice, that comes down to a few writing habits. The first is to open every page and every section with the answer, not the background: if the question is “how long does a bathroom renovation take?”, the first sentence has to say what it depends on and what timescale is reasonable, not tell the history of the company. The second is to use specific names: “we cover the whole island” says far less than “we work in Palma, Marratxí, Llucmajor and the Calvià area”. The third is to speak from experience: what you see day to day, what mistakes clients make before they call you, what they always ask. That's precisely what an AI can't get from anywhere else, and what makes it trust you as a source.

The technical side: making sure the machine can read you

There's also a technical layer that helps the machine read you well: structured data (schema.org), a fast, semantic site, and signals that there's a real, trustworthy business behind it — author, address, reviews. We explain it step by step in structured data, llms.txt and E‑E‑A‑T, which is the natural follow-on from this article.

This is where we see a very common mistake: eye-catching websites whose important text sits inside images, sliders or PDFs, or which rely so heavily on JavaScript that the crawler receives an almost empty page. A person sees everything; a model may see nothing. Another frequent fault is accidentally blocking AI crawlers in robots.txt or from the hosting panel, sometimes through a security plugin the owner doesn't even know is switched on. Before writing a single new line, it's worth checking that what you already have can actually be read.

Where to start if you run a business in Mallorca

If you want to get going without getting lost, this is the order we follow. First, find out where you stand: ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the same thing a customer would ask you — “recommend a dental clinic in Palma”, “where can I hire a boat in Port d'Andratx” — and note whether you appear, what they say about you and who they name instead. If you'd rather do it methodically, our AI visibility test sums it up for you.

Second, review your home page and service pages so that they state in plain text who you are, what you do, where and for whom. Third, add content that answers your customers' real questions, one per page or per section, with the answer at the top. Fourth, put things in order beyond your website: Google listing, industry directories and reviews, which is what we develop in how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business. And fifth, repeat the test every few months, because answers change, and what doesn't show up today may show up tomorrow — and vice versa.

Questions business owners ask us

“So do I have to stop doing SEO?” No. A good part of what AIs read reaches them through search engines, and a website that doesn't rank has fewer chances of being cited. GEO is built on top of SEO, not instead of it.

“Can I pay to appear in ChatGPT's answer?” Even if a platform shows or tests adverts, the recommendation itself isn't for sale. Be wary of anyone who promises to place you inside the answer in exchange for a payment or through some secret trick.

“How long before I notice anything?” It depends on what needs fixing and on each platform: some look up the web in real time, while others lean mainly on what they learnt during training. What is certain is that the sooner you start, the sooner your information will be there when the model goes looking for it.

An opportunity almost nobody is taking yet

For a local business like the ones we run at Teix, GEO is a huge and still under‑used opportunity: most of your competitors haven't even considered it. Whoever starts showing up in AI answers now will have the same edge that, fifteen years ago, went to those who took Google seriously before anyone else. If you want your site in that conversation, we explain how we work on it in our AI search optimisation service — and then let's talk.

Sources: Google: AI features and your website (AI Overviews and AI Mode) · Google: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content · OpenAI: overview of OpenAI crawlers (GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot) · Perplexity: Perplexity crawlers (PerplexityBot)