GEO: how to get AI to recommend you

Type «which company would you recommend to build my website in Girona» into ChatGPT and you will see what your customer sees: three names, one sentence about each, and little else. No ten blue links, no second page, no sponsored slot you can buy. If your business is not in that answer, it does not exist for that person. Working your way into it is what we call GEO, generative engine optimisation.

What GEO actually is

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. Put plainly: getting ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or the AI summary Google now shows at the top of the page to know who you are, understand what you do and name you when somebody asks about your line of work.

What changes compared with the old search box is the shape of the answer. Google handed over twenty links and the customer picked one. The AI picks for them and returns two or three names with a reason attached. So the game is no longer getting onto page one: it is getting into the sentence.

Google's own developer documentation explains how AI features in Search work and what a page needs in order to show up in them. It is worth reading before you commission anything, if only to spot whoever is selling you smoke.

Where it overlaps with SEO and where it doesn't

Classic SEO is about climbing a list of results. GEO is about being quoted inside a written answer. They share foundations —a site that can be read, content that genuinely answers something, a decent reputation— which is why anyone with SEO already in place starts ahead. But there are differences you feel day to day:

• The unit of measurement changes. In SEO you count positions and visits. In GEO you count mentions: how often you come up when somebody asks about your sector and your area, and how you get described.
• The shape of the content changes. An AI gets on much better with a clear answer in the first two lines than with a thousand words of preamble before you mention the price.
• What other people say about you weighs more. Mentions in directories, local press, forums and reviews carry real weight, because the model uses them to work out who to trust.

GEO does not replace SEO. They are worked on together, and usually the second one pulls the first along.

Where the AI gets the names it recommends

No AI invents who to recommend. It pulls from what has been published about you and from what it can read in real time. Three sources come up every single time.

Your website, if it can be read and understood

If your page takes eight seconds to load, hides the services behind an odd menu or never says where you work, the machine has nothing to go on. The pages that perform best have a boring, clear structure: one service per page, the price or the range, the area covered, and questions with their answers.

What other people say about you

This is reviews, mentions in the local press, trade directories and anywhere your name appears next to what you do. A business nobody talks about is hard to recommend. Posts on your Google listing help precisely here: they create fresh, published material about what you do, in your own words.

Your details saying the same thing everywhere

Name, address, phone number, opening hours and services have to match on the website, on the Google listing and in any directory you appear in. When one source says one thing and another says something else, the model lowers its confidence and takes the safe route: naming somebody else.

What to change on a site so AI understands it

This is the plumbing, the part almost nobody shows off because it looks dull in a slide deck:

• Answer in the first two lines. Each page opens by answering the question that brought the reader there, and the detail follows.
• Real frequently asked questions. The ones you get on the phone, with the answer you give on the phone. No filler.
• Structured data. Schema.org markup is the vocabulary you use to tell a machine what each thing is: this is a company, this is a service, this is a question and its answer.
• Don't block AI crawlers. It happens more often than you would think: the site's robots.txt shuts out OpenAI's bots and the rest, frequently without the owner knowing. OpenAI publishes which crawlers it uses and how to identify them, so checking takes five minutes.
• One page per service and per area. If you cover four counties, a single page mixing them all together works neither for Google nor for the AI.
• Concrete facts. Prices, timescales, conditions. A text full of adjectives without a single figure gives nobody anything to quote.

How to check whether AI mentions you today

You need no tool and no subscription to start. It is done by hand and takes half an hour:

1. Write down the ten questions your customer would ask. In their words, not yours: «emergency locksmith in Blanes», not «professional locksmith services».
2. Ask them in three different places: ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Logged out, so you don't get served what you already know.
3. Note on a sheet who appears in each answer and the words used to describe them.
4. Repeat the exercise a month later, with the same questions.

That sheet is your baseline. Once you do appear, you get something else that is genuinely useful: how the AI describes you. If it introduces you as «a web design company» and you make your living from custom software, you now know what needs fixing on the site.

What doesn't work

• Filling the site with generated text. A hundred AI-written articles that nobody edits don't make you trustworthy; they make you one more among everyone doing the same.
• Inventing credentials. Awards that don't exist, round numbers with no source, «industry leaders». Models cross-check sources, and anything that doesn't hold up outside your own website adds nothing.
• Expecting results in a week. Content has to be published, indexed and picked up on the model's next pass. This is measured in months, not days.
• Paying to «appear in ChatGPT». There is no button for sale. Anyone selling it that way either doesn't understand it or is counting on you not to.

What GEO costs

In our case it isn't sold separately: GEO sits inside the monthly plans, because it shares work with everything else —content, the Google listing, reputation—. It is published on our pricing page with no small print:

• Presencia Básica, €400 a month plus VAT: hosting, website and email migration, 10 mailboxes, three monthly articles on your site, three on your Google listing, replies to every review, and GEO.
• Presencia Media, €750 a month plus VAT: all of the above with five articles on the site, five on the listing, and management of Google Ads and Meta Ads campaigns.
• Presencia Avanzada, €1,500 a month plus VAT: the full plan for sectors where competition is fierce.

None of them ties you in. And if what you need is something else, we say so: a business whose Google listing is still half finished gets more out of finishing that first than out of GEO.

Where to start this week

Five things you can do yourself, without hiring anyone:

• Ask about your sector and your town in two different AI tools and note who comes up.
• Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and check you aren't blocking AI crawlers.
• Check that the name, phone number and opening hours match on the website and on the Google listing.
• Add three real questions with a short answer to every service page.
• Publish your prices, or at least a range. It is the thing people ask about most and the thing almost nobody puts online.

That alone puts you ahead of most of your competition. GEO is still new ground, and here the advantage goes to whoever moves first rather than whoever spends most.