People ask ChatGPT now. You want to be the answer.
Generative engine optimisation — making your business the one AI assistants cite when someone asks them for a recommendation, and measuring whether it worked.
A list of links is a competition. An answer isn't.
For twenty years being found meant appearing somewhere in a list of ten links, and the whole trade was about climbing that list.
A growing share of questions no longer produce that list. Someone asks ChatGPT which drainlayer to call in Papakura. Google writes an answer above its own results. The person reads a paragraph, and acts on it.
That is a harsher format than a list, and it is worth being clear about why. A list has ten places and a second page. An answer names two or three businesses, or none at all, and there is nowhere below it to be. You are quoted or you are absent.
This is what people mean by AI SEO or generative engine optimisation. Stripped of the acronym, it is the work of being the source an assistant reaches for — and then checking, on a schedule, whether it actually reached for you.
Ten places, or two or three.
A list has ten places and a second page under it. An answer names two or three, and there is nothing underneath.
You can't rank in an answer. You can only be cited in one — or left out of it.
Checked every week, and published either way.
- HygieNZ (opens HygieNZ's website) construction site clean up services#2
What actually makes a business quotable
Nobody outside those companies knows exactly how an assistant chooses its sources. But the inputs it can only get from you are not mysterious, and they are the same ones that have always made a page genuinely useful.
- Sentences that stand up on their own. A model quotes a passage, not a page. “We pride ourselves on quality workmanship” cannot be quoted about anything. “We replace clay drainage lines in South Auckland, usually in a day” can.
- The questions answered in the words people ask them. With the answer in the first sentence, not the fourth paragraph. The first sentence is what gets lifted.
- The same facts in machine-readable form. Structured data restates what the page says in a format that needs no interpreting — and an llms.txt gives an assistant a plain summary of what the site is for.
- Consistency wherever you appear. A model weighing conflicting details about a business tends to trust none of them.
- Existing somewhere other than your own website. This is the one most people skip. Assistants lean heavily on directories, listings and third-party write-ups, so being listed is worth as much as being ranked.
None of that is a trick, and that is rather the point. There is no way to game a system that is summarising what the web already says about you — the work is making sure the web says something clear.
Nobody can promise you a citation. Anybody promising one isn't measuring them.
Ask an assistant who it recommends.
Try your own trade and your own town in ChatGPT tonight, and see whether you come up. Then send me what it said.
Questions people ask
What is AI SEO?
AI SEO, also called generative engine optimisation or GEO, is the work of getting a business cited in the answers assistants write — ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overview — rather than only in the list of links underneath.
It matters because the format is unforgiving. A results page has ten positions and a second page; a written answer mentions two or three businesses or none, and there is nowhere below it to appear.
How do I get my business mentioned by ChatGPT?
By being the clearest available source on the question, and by existing in more than one place on the web.
In practice that means writing sentences that make sense quoted on their own, answering real questions with the answer in the first line, restating the key facts as structured data, keeping your details identical everywhere they appear, and being listed in the directories and third-party sites assistants lean on. There is no submission form and no way to pay for a mention.
Can you guarantee my business will be cited by AI?
No. Anyone offering that guarantee is describing something they do not control, and usually is not measuring citations at all.
What is on offer instead is the work and the measurement: the site built to be quotable, and a weekly check of whether Google's AI Overview cites you on your terms and whether ChatGPT and Perplexity mention you when asked. The result goes in the monthly report whichever way it went.
Is GEO different from SEO?
They overlap far more than the separate labels suggest. Most of what makes a page quotable by an assistant is what has always made it useful to a search engine: clear structure, real answers, correct facts, and a site that works.
The genuine differences are in emphasis. GEO cares about passages rather than pages, leans harder on structured data and consistency across the whole web, and needs a different measurement — you cannot check a citation by looking at a rankings report. Here they are the same job, and the AI check is a layer of the same weekly audit.
How do you measure whether AI search visibility is working?
Three checks, run weekly. Whether Google's AI Overview appears for your terms and whether its sources include your site. Whether ChatGPT and Perplexity name you when asked the kind of question a customer would ask. And whether the underlying search positions those answers draw on are holding.
One caution worth stating: a negative result is less reliable than a positive one. Assistants vary their answers between runs, so “not cited this week” is weaker evidence than “cited this week”. Reports here say what was found rather than reporting an absence as a zero.