When ChatGPT recommends businesses: SEO, GEO and the new search
More and more customers ask AI assistants instead of Google. What Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) means, and how to prepare your presence so the assistants recommend you.
For twenty years, “being found online” meant “ranking high on Google”. That isn’t going away — but a second channel is growing beside it: customers who ask ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini “which company should I hire for an online store?” and trust the answer. If your business isn’t readable by these systems, you don’t exist in that channel.
What changes — and what stays the same
Classic SEO logic isn’t discarded: a fast site, sound structure and quality content remain the foundation, because AI engines feed on the same data Google crawls — and often on Google’s results themselves. Whatever wins at SEO also counts for GEO.
What changes is what reads easily. Answer engines don’t rank pages — they compose answers. They look for clean, self-contained statements: who you are, what you do, for whom, with what proof. The page that “says it all” in two thousand lyrical words loses to the page that answers specific questions in specific paragraphs.
The practical GEO checklist
Answers per section. Every service page should state explicitly: what’s included, how long it takes, what it costs (even indicatively), who it’s for. FAQ sections aren’t decoration — they’re ready-made answers that engines reproduce verbatim.
Structured data (schema). Organization, Service, FAQPage, Article — metadata that tells machines what each thing is, so they don’t have to guess.
Clean, fast HTML. Content visible without JavaScript, a correct heading hierarchy, sensible URLs. Whatever slows a crawler excludes an assistant.
llms.txt and markdown. A newer convention: files that summarise your site in a language-model-friendly format. Few sites have it — an advantage for those who move early.
Presence beyond your site. Engines cross-reference: business profiles, reviews, mentions in industry media. A business that exists only on its own website is a thin source.
The measurable question
How do you know it’s working? Ask the assistants what your customer would ask — “good company for custom software in Athens” — and see whether and how you appear. Repeat quarterly. And add “an AI assistant recommended you” to your how-did-you-find-us question — the percentages will surprise you soon.
Kronn’s digital marketing service covers technical SEO and AI-search readiness as one package — because it is now one job. Want an audit of your current presence? Request it here.