SEO and GEO: visible in search and AI answers
Found in search and quoted in AI answers, not just ranked: technical SEO, content built as answers, markup, access for AI crawlers and honest measurements.
What’s included
- Technical SEO — structure, indexing, redirects, markup, crawl budget
- Schema markup that describes your business precisely enough to be quoted
- Content restructured into self-contained, citable answers AI assistants can lift
- Question-format headings and visible update dates, because that is what gets picked up
- Tracking of where and how you appear in AI answers, not just in blue links
- Fixes prioritised by traffic actually at risk
Who it’s for
- Companies watching organic traffic fall while rankings stay flat
- Businesses invisible in AI answers while competitors get named
- Sites with good content buried under bad structure
In short
SEO makes a site findable in search results; GEO makes it quoted in the answers of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews. They rest on the same foundation — clean structure, indexing, speed and markup — but GEO adds content built as self-contained answers, visible facts and dates, authorship and access for AI crawlers. We start with an audit and a snapshot of where you appear today, fix first what puts real traffic at risk, then rebuild the content and measure positions, clicks and mentions in AI answers. Promotion is months of work, and nobody honest guarantees the top. The price is counted in hours.
The rules have changed: search now answers by itself
Search used to be a list of links: win a position, get a click. Now Google shows AI Overviews above the results, and people more and more often ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude directly. The answer is assembled from several sources and given right away — a person often gets what they needed without clicking at all. That is why traffic can fall while rankings stay the same.
An answer does not include whoever is higher in the list, but whoever is easiest for a machine to read, understand and check. The winner is the source the answer is built from: its name and link appear inside the answer, and the people who click through arrive already convinced.
This is where boxed solutions lose. A site builder or a CMS with a theme and plugins sends heavy markup: dozens of nested wrappers, service code, content that appears only after scripts run, duplicate pages and structured data generated by a plugin as it happened to. A person does not notice it, but a robot spends its time on it and often never reaches the point — and most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript at all.
Clean code gives the machine exactly what it needs: semantic HTML where a heading is a heading and an answer is a paragraph, content right in the server’s response, precise Schema.org markup describing your business, one page per address and a fast server. Such a site is easy to read, take apart into facts and quote — which is why it gets quoted.
- Answers instead of a list of links
- Quoted is whoever is easier to read
- Clean code is machine-readable from day one
A boxed solution and clean code through the eyes of AI
The same page can be easy or hard for a machine to read. Here is where the difference lies.
| Criterion | Site builder or CMS | Clean code |
|---|---|---|
| Content in the HTML | often loaded by scripts | right in the server’s response |
| Page markup | wrappers and service code of the theme and plugins | semantic tags: heading, section, article, question |
| Schema.org | a plugin template, or none | precise, describes your services and answers |
| Speed | heavy themes and plugins | only the code that is needed |
| Duplicates and junk pages | tags, archives, parameters | one page — one address |
| Access for AI crawlers | within the platform’s settings | robots.txt, llms.txt and protection under your control |
| Adapting to new rules | wait for a platform or plugin update | changed straight away |
SEO and GEO: what is the difference
One is about being found, the other about being quoted. Today a site needs both.
| Criterion | SEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|
| Where you appear | links in Google search results | answers of ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and AI Overviews |
| What success is | a position and a click | a mention and a link inside the answer |
| What is valued | relevance, structure, speed, links | clear facts, self-contained answers, authority |
| How it is measured | positions and clicks in Search Console | a set of questions to the assistants and visits from them |
| Common ground | technical base, structure, speed, markup | the same — without it there is no GEO |
Technical SEO: what we check and fix
The foundation for both search and AI. If a page is not indexed or is read wrongly, no text will help it.
Indexing
- robots.txt, sitemap and canonical addresses
- Duplicates, response codes and redirect chains
- Crawl budget: robots do not waste time on junk pages
Structure
- Readable addresses and nesting by meaning
- Internal links and breadcrumbs
- A page for each intent instead of one page for everything
Markup
- Schema.org: organisation, services, products, articles, questions
- Headings h1–h3 without gaps, titles and descriptions
- Alt text and Open Graph
Speed and mobile
- Core Web Vitals on real devices
- Content in the HTML, not only after scripts run
Languages
- hreflang and separate semantics for each language
- Own titles and texts — a translated page does not rank on its own
Moves
- A 301 redirect map from every old address to its new one
- Watching indexing and rankings after the switch
GEO: how to get into AI answers
AI systems take ready pieces from pages they trust. The task is to give them such pieces — and not to lock the door.
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01
Self-contained answers
A paragraph answers the question in full and makes sense outside the page — those are the pieces AI answers lift.
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02
Headings as questions
Headings in the form people ask, with the answer right below.
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03
Facts and dates
Numbers, terms and a visible update date — models prefer what can be checked and is fresh.
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04
Authorship and expertise
Who wrote it and why they can be trusted: a name, experience, real projects.
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05
Markup
Schema.org describes the business, services and answers precisely enough to be quoted.
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06
Content without scripts
Most AI crawlers do not run JavaScript: what appears only after scripts is invisible to them.
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07
An open door
robots.txt and protection settings must let search AI crawlers in — on part of the sites behind Cloudflare they are blocked by default.
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08
llms.txt
A proposed table of contents of the site for language models. Not every system reads it yet, but it is cheap and does no harm.
AI crawlers: whom to let in
Some robots collect data to train models, others fetch pages for answers. You can say no to training and still stay in AI search. The list changes — we check it at every setup.
| Robot | Company | What for | Advice |
|---|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | search in ChatGPT | let in |
| GPTBot | OpenAI | training models | your choice |
| Claude-SearchBot | Anthropic | search in Claude | let in |
| ClaudeBot | Anthropic | training models | your choice |
| PerplexityBot | Perplexity | the Perplexity search index | let in |
| Google-Extended | use of content for Gemini; does not affect Google Search or AI Overviews | your choice |
How the work goes
Promotion is months of steady work, not a one-off setup. On sites we built we do everything ourselves; on others we write out the technical changes for your team and handle the content.
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Audit and snapshot
Positions, clicks, indexing and how you appear in AI answers to a set of real questions.
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Semantics and intents
Queries are collected and grouped by what people actually want — each group gets its page.
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What is at risk first
Fixes are ranked by the traffic actually at risk, not by the length of a checklist.
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Content
Existing pages are rebuilt into clear answers, missing ones are written for the intents.
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Markup and access for AI
Schema.org, update dates, authorship, robots.txt and llms.txt.
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Measurements every month
A report on positions, clicks, mentions in AI answers and requests from search.
How we measure the result
Not one number but a picture: from indexing to requests.
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01
Positions and clicks
From Google Search Console — what queries you are shown for and how often you are chosen.
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02
Visits from AI
Visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity and other assistants are visible in analytics as a separate source.
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03
Mentions in answers
A fixed set of questions is asked to the assistants regularly: are you named, and with a link or without.
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04
Requests, not just visits
Traffic is matched with requests and sales — so the work is judged by money.
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05
Indexing
How many pages are in the index and how fast new ones get there.
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06
Speed
Core Web Vitals of real visitors — so the site does not quietly get slower.
Common SEO and GEO mistakes
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Expecting results in a week
Search engines re-evaluate a site over months; quick promises usually mean risky methods.
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Text for robots
Keywords stuffed into a paragraph at the bottom of the page help neither people nor search.
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Locking out AI by accident
A blanket ban in robots.txt or the protection settings removes the site from AI answers.
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Content only in scripts
What the server does not send in HTML is seen worse by search and not at all by most AI crawlers.
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Hundreds of generated pages
Mass pages without value fall under search engines’ spam rules and drag the whole site down.
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Links in bulk
Link schemes are punished; what works is mentions on sites people trust.
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A move without redirects
Traffic collapses in the first month, and positions come back for months.
Questions about SEO and GEO
What is GEO?
Generative Engine Optimisation: work that makes a site quoted in the answers of AI systems — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google’s AI Overviews.
How much does SEO promotion cost?
The price is counted in hours and depends on the competition in the niche: the tighter it is, the deeper and longer the work. The estimate is free.
When will there be results?
Technical fixes show up in weeks; growth in positions and AI mentions takes months. It depends on the niche, the competitors and algorithm updates.
Do you guarantee the top?
No, and nobody honest does: the top depends on competition and on algorithms nobody controls. We guarantee the work and its measurement.
How do we get into ChatGPT answers?
Let its search robot in, give clear self-contained answers with facts and dates, show authorship and get mentioned on sites that are trusted.
Do we need llms.txt?
It does not hurt and costs little, but it is a proposed format, and not all systems read it yet. Content, markup and access matter more.
Which search engines do you work with?
Google and the AI systems: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and AI Overviews.
Is SEO included in website development?
Basic optimisation is part of every site we build. Promotion is a separate service after launch that runs for months.
Do you work with sites you did not build?
Yes: the audit, semantics, content and measurement we do ourselves, and the technical changes we write out for your team — we do not rework someone else’s code.
Should we block AI crawlers?
Training robots — your choice. Search robots of AI systems are better let in, otherwise the site will not appear in their answers.
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Discuss
SEO and GEO
Send the site address and tell us what worries you — falling traffic, competitors in AI answers, a planned move. We will look and suggest where to start. The consultation is free.