Ask ChatGPT to recommend a supplier in your field and your country. If your company isn't in the answer, you're invisible to everyone who searches that way. This article explains where the assistants get the names they recommend, what you can realistically influence and how to test it in 30 minutes.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of getting into those answers. There's a lot of noise around it, and plenty of people selling fixes that don't exist. Most of what works is ordinary, careful SEO and reputation work, done with one extra question in mind: which pages does the assistant read before it answers?
In short
For recommendation questions, AI assistants usually don't answer from memory alone. They run a web search, read a handful of pages and summarise them. Gemini uses Google Search. ChatGPT uses its own search index, built by the OAI-SearchBot crawler, together with third-party search providers. Perplexity runs its own index alongside other sources.
So the names in the answer come from whatever the search finds. There's also what the model learned during training, but that only changes when a new model version is released, and you have almost no direct influence over it. Spend your effort on the pages the search can find.
| Source | Examples | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Directories, review sites, comparison lists | Industry directories, review platforms, your Google Business Profile, articles titled "the best X agencies in Y". | Find the ones that rank for your customers' questions and get listed, with accurate details and genuine reviews. |
| Editorial coverage | Trade press, local news, interviews, podcasts, conference talks with a published write-up. | Offer expertise, data or a client story to the outlets your buyers read. Slow, but it helps in normal search too. |
| Your own website | Service pages, case studies, a clear "about" page. | Make sure your pages rank for the questions and state plainly what you do, for whom and where. |
Directory and list pages tend to rank well for recommendation-style searches, which is why they're often the first thing an assistant reads.
Your own site matters more than most GEO advice suggests. On 15 May 2026 Google stated that AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same ranking systems as ordinary search, and that no llms.txt file or special markup is needed to appear in them. If your page ranks for the question, there's a good chance it gets read. That's why we treat SEO as the base of GEO rather than a separate discipline.
Some sites blocked every AI bot in robots.txt as a precaution and shut out the ones that power live search too. The bots do different jobs and can be handled separately.
| Name in robots.txt | Company | What it does | If you block it |
|---|---|---|---|
| OAI-SearchBot | OpenAI | Crawls pages so they can appear in ChatGPT search. | Your pages stop surfacing in ChatGPT search answers. |
| GPTBot | OpenAI | Collects content for model training. | No effect on ChatGPT search. |
| Google-Extended | Not a crawler but a token: controls whether your content is used to train Gemini. | No effect on Google rankings or AI Overviews. |
Based on OpenAI's and Google's crawler documentation. Status October 2026.
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt and look for "Disallow: /" under OAI-SearchBot or under a blanket "User-agent: *". Security plugins and some CDN settings add AI-bot blocks without asking. It takes two minutes, and an accidental block is an easy cause to rule out before you work on anything else.
Answers vary between users and from day to day, so one response tells you very little. You're looking for a pattern.
Phrase them as your customer would, not as you would. For example: "Which [service] agency in [country] would you recommend?", "I need [product] near [town]. Where should I buy it?", "Who provides [service] for [industry] companies in Europe?", "What do you know about [your company]?" and "How does [your company] compare with [competitor]?"
ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, each in a temporary chat or logged out, each question twice.
For every answer: were you named, in what position, which competitors were named and which sources were cited.
The cited pages are your to-do list. For "what do you know about us", also check whether the facts are right. Wrong prices or old addresses usually trace back to one outdated directory entry.
Repeat the check every month with the same questions. Change the questions and you lose the comparison.
| Change | When it can show up in answers |
|---|---|
| Your own pages | Within a few weeks, once they're recrawled. |
| Directory listings | Depends on whoever runs the directory. |
| Editorial coverage | Months of steady work. |
| Training data | Only with the next model release. |
Expect a few months before the pattern of answers shifts. Nobody can guarantee that ChatGPT will name you, because nobody outside the provider controls it. Treat any promise to the contrary with suspicion.
If you'd rather we ran the test for your sector and sent you the list of sources where you're missing, contact us. How paid search and SEO feed each other while you wait for organic results is covered in Google Ads and SEO together.
Generative engine optimisation: making sure AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name your company when someone asks for a supplier like you.
Mostly not. Because assistants pull live search results for recommendation questions, the work overlaps heavily with SEO. The extra part is getting listed and reviewed on the third-party pages that rank for those questions, and making sure your company facts are consistent everywhere.
You can pay for ChatGPT ads, which went live in Europe on 24 August 2026. OpenAI said in February 2026 that ads are marked as sponsored, shown apart from the answer and don't influence what ChatGPT says. So an ad buys a separate placement, not a mention in the answer itself.
Block training bots if you want to, but leave search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot and Googlebot alone, or you disappear from the answers that use live search.
Monthly, with the same questions, the same tools and the same settings. More often mostly measures random variation between answers.
No. Nobody outside OpenAI, Google or Perplexity controls the answers, and answers differ between users and days. Treat a guarantee as a reason to look for a different supplier.
We show how AI tools see you today.