Explainer
GEO, in full Generative Engine Optimization, is optimizing your website and your online information so that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini mention and recommend your business in their answers.
A search result gave ten options and let the customer choose. An AI answer chooses three itself. Outside those three you no longer commercially exist.
Ten organic places. Number eight got little, but got something.
ChatGPT
3 names
Three businesses named
One answer with three names in it. There is no second page.
AI visibility is how often an AI assistant mentions your business when someone asks for a recommendation, for example when asking for a good plumber in your city. If you are not mentioned, you do not exist in that answer, however good you are.
More and more people ask an AI assistant for a recommendation instead of scanning a list of search results. An AI answer contains only a handful of names. GEO is about ending up in that handful.
There is no switch for this and nobody can guarantee a position. What demonstrably helps: keep your business name, town and offering consistent and complete everywhere online, answer the questions customers actually ask in clear, self-contained texts with true figures and references to sources, add structured data (JSON-LD), and then measure regularly whether it works.
llms.txt is a text file in the root of your website describing what your site is and where the key information lives, modelled on robots.txt. In all honesty: no demonstrable use of llms.txt by AI search has been measured yet, not even in large citation studies. We ship it as cheap insurance for when that changes, not as a proven intervention.
JSON-LD is a block of machine-readable data in your page that makes facts about your business explicit: name, address, offering, opening hours and prices. Machines then do not have to guess those facts from your prose.
SEO is about being found in search engines, GEO about being recommended in AI answers. Much of the work overlaps, but AI engines weigh other things more heavily, such as entity clarity and citable, self-contained answers. Research across ten thousand queries also shows a strong correlation between good Google positions and mentions in AI answers, while backlinks show hardly any; it is a correlation, not proof of cause. Your SEO work helps your AI visibility along.
By repeatedly putting the same customer questions to the AI engines and counting how often your business appears in the answers. That is what Emphanic does: a free measurement across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini, followed by the concrete fixes and a weekly measurement to steer on.
The check is free and returns results within 90 seconds.
