Guide · GEO
How do you get your business cited by ChatGPT and other AI assistants?
A business is mentioned by ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Perplexity when the assistant can read its website, finds a clear answer to the question there, and sees the same facts confirmed on other sites. There is no form to submit and nobody can guarantee a mention. What you can do is remove the obstacles and measure, with a fixed set of questions, whether the mentions follow.
Where does an assistant get what it says about you?
From two places: what the language model learned when it was trained, and pages it finds by searching the web while it answers. You cannot change the first until the provider releases a new model. The second you can influence now, and it takes three things: access, pages that answer, and confirmation elsewhere. The background is in What is GEO?
Can the assistants read your site?
- Open robots.txt and look for rules that name GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot. Security plugins, hosting companies and content delivery networks sometimes refuse them by default.
- Decide deliberately. Refusing a crawler that collects text for training and allowing one that fetches pages for search are separate choices; each provider documents which of its crawlers does what.
- View a page with JavaScript switched off. If the main text has gone, a crawler that does not run scripts sees an empty page.
- Make sure the site is indexed by Bing as well as Google. Copilot draws on Bing's index, and registering with Bing Webmaster Tools takes little time.
Do your pages answer the question?
- One question per page, stated in the heading in the words your customers use.
- The answer in the first two or three sentences, complete without the rest of the page.
- Specifics: what you do, for whom, where, what is included and what is not. Put your name, location and service area in the text, not only in a logo or a map.
- No contradictions between pages, and no pages describing what you stopped offering.
- Structured data for the organisation, the services and the questions answered, so that a machine does not have to infer them.
Do other sources confirm it?
Assistants give more weight to what several independent sources agree on.
- Keep name, address and activity identical in your business profile, directories and social profiles.
- Collect reviews on the platforms that matter in your trade.
- Be named where your field is described: trade press, professional associations, partners, suppliers, and the lists and comparisons an assistant tends to cite when asked for a recommendation.
- Where something wrong is written about you, have it corrected at the source.
How do you know whether it works?
By asking. Draw up a fixed list of questions a customer would put, ask the same assistants at set intervals, and record three things: are you mentioned, what is said, and which sources are cited. Answers vary from one run to the next, so judge the pattern over several runs, not a single answer. Visits that arrive from an assistant also show up as referrals in your website statistics.
That baseline is where our GEO work starts.
Frequently asked questions
Can I submit my website to ChatGPT?
There is no submission form for its answers. What you can do is allow OpenAI's crawlers in robots.txt, make sure the site is present in the search indexes assistants draw on, and publish pages that answer the questions you want to be found for.
Should I block AI crawlers to protect my content?
That is a business decision with a trade-off. Refusing every AI crawler keeps your text out of their systems and also keeps your business out of their answers. Many companies allow the crawlers that fetch pages for search and decide separately about those that collect training data.
Why does ChatGPT say something wrong about my business?
Usually because its sources are out of date, contradict each other or say very little, and the model fills the gap. Correct your own pages and the outside sources first. An assistant that searches the web picks up the correction sooner than the model's trained knowledge, which changes only with a new version.
Does this work the same way in every language?
The principles do, but the work has to be done per language. An assistant generally answers in the language of the question and tends to draw on sources in that language, so a page that exists only in English may not serve a customer who asks in French.
Let's talk about your project.
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