AI search (GEO)
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the work of making sure AI assistants recommend your business when someone asks them for one. When a customer asks ChatGPT “who’s the best electrician in Leeds?” or asks Perplexity to compare local accountants, GEO is what puts your name in the answer instead of a competitor’s.
It’s the newest, and most overlooked, way to get found. Most agencies don’t even offer it yet.
Why GEO matters now
People increasingly ask an AI assistant instead of scrolling Google:
- ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and others now answer “recommend me a…” questions directly.
- Google’s AI Overviews put an AI-written answer above the normal results.
- These tools name a handful of businesses, and most people never look past them.
Traditional SEO gets you into a list of links. GEO gets you into the answer itself. They are different jobs, and you want both.
The levers that actually move AI search
These are the same best-practices A1 Digital applies to every site we run, including this one:
| Lever | What we do |
|---|---|
| Crawlability | robots.txt that explicitly allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, OAI-SearchBot and Google-Extended |
llms.txt | A curated map of your business and best pages, written for AI to read |
| Answer-shaped content | Clear Q&A and “what is X” sections that AI can lift directly into an answer |
| Structured data | Organization, Service, FAQPage and Product JSON-LD so machines read your business unambiguously |
| Statistics & specifics | Real numbers, dates and named facts, AI engines favour pages with concrete detail |
| Quotable sentences | Self-contained claims an AI can quote without needing surrounding context |
| Comparison content | ”X vs Y” and “best X for Y” pages, among the most-cited formats in AI answers |
| Freshness | Visible “last updated” dates so AI trusts the content is current |
| Entity clarity | Consistent name, description and contact details everywhere, plus sameAs links to your profiles |
What we do for you
- Make your site machine-readable, structured data and a clean, fast build AI crawlers can parse
- Welcome the AI crawlers in
robots.txtand maintain a richllms.txt - Write answer-shaped content every month that targets the questions buyers actually ask
- Keep your entity consistent, your name, services and area identical wherever AI models look
- On Premier, run quarterly AI-visibility checks, we literally ask the assistants for businesses like yours and tune your content to win those answers
What’s included by plan
| Plan | GEO |
|---|---|
| Essentials | Foundational entity clarity & structured data |
| Complete | Full GEO, crawler access, llms.txt, answer-shaped content, structured data |
| Premier | Advanced GEO + quarterly AI-visibility checks and tuning |
FAQ
What’s the difference between SEO and GEO? SEO gets you into Google’s list of links. GEO gets you named inside an AI assistant’s written answer. Same goal (be found), different machines.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend me? No, and nobody honestly can. AI answers vary by phrasing and change over time. We do the proven work that makes your business eligible and likely to be cited. See Results & what to expect.
Does GEO help my normal Google ranking too? Yes. Most GEO work, structured data, clear content, consistent entity details, also strengthens classic Google SEO. They reinforce each other.
How do you measure GEO? On Premier we run quarterly checks, asking real AI assistants for businesses like yours and recording whether you appear. Across plans, we track AI-assistant referrals in your analytics.
GEO is the new front of getting found. For the classic side, Google Search and Maps, see Google & local SEO.
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