A procurement manager in Riyadh types into ChatGPT: "I need a company in Jordan that can build a management system for training centers." He does not get ten blue links. He gets three or four names, each with a short reason. If your company is not one of them, then as far as that buyer is concerned, you do not exist.
This field is called generative engine optimization, or GEO. It grows out of SEO and depends on it, and the steps below are ones we applied to our own site first.
- The user asksin their own language and dialect
- The engine searchesits index and the live web at that moment
- It picks sourcesclear, trustworthy pages that answer directly
- It writes the answerand names the companies it found in those sources
Can AI crawlers read your website?
Each engine sends crawlers with known names. OpenAI has GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, Anthropic has ClaudeBot, Perplexity has PerplexityBot, and Google uses Google-Extended to control whether your content is used in its models. Open your site's robots.txt file and make sure it does not block them. Then check the security settings at your hosting provider or CDN, because some of them block these bots by default and never tell you.
If your site only renders its text through JavaScript after the page loads, some of these crawlers will see an empty page. Anything important needs to be in the page's HTML.
Does the AI engine know who your company is?
Language models build their picture of your company from signals that agree with each other. Write your name the same way everywhere, along with your legal name and your Arabic name. Keep the address, phone numbers and email identical across your website, your Google Business Profile and your social accounts. Add Organization and LocalBusiness structured data that lists your services, the countries you serve and your official profiles. Then write an About page that says plainly who you are, where you are based, how long you have been operating and what you offer.
How do you write content that AI tools quote?
Generative answers pull in clear sentences that answer the question directly. Open every service page with one sentence that says what the service is and who it is for. Make your subheadings the questions your customers really ask, and answer in the first two lines underneath. Use facts and numbers that can be checked. Nobody quotes marketing lines like "we are the market leader."
What is llms.txt, and do you need one?
It is a text file at the root of your site that summarizes who you are and points to your most important pages, written in Markdown. It is an open proposal, and not every engine has adopted it. Adding one takes about an hour, and any model that reads it gets a focused picture of your business. Here is the llms.txt file on our site as an example.
Why do mentions on other websites matter?
Models do not take your word for it. A mention in a specialist news site, a business directory, the page of a trade show you exhibited at, or a case study a client published are all trust signals. One interview on an industry site can do more for you than twenty posts on your own blog.
What about traditional SEO?
You still need the basics. Register your site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, submit your sitemap, and pay attention to mobile speed. Some answer engines rely on Bing's index, so do not ignore it.
Do you need anything special to appear in Google's AI Overviews?
No. Google says there are no extra requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and you do not need AI-specific files or any particular type of structured data. The page has to be indexed and eligible to show in search with a text snippet. In other words, the same SEO fundamentals are what get you into these answers.
So check that you have not put nosnippet, or a small max-snippet value, on your important pages, since those limit what Google can show from them. Google-Extended controls whether your content is used to train some of Google's other systems, and it does not remove you from search results. Google counts appearances in these features in the Performance report in Search Console, under the "Web" search type.
Why don't AI tools mention your company?
In most of the cases we review, the cause is one of these:
- The site is poorly indexed in Google and Bing, so the engines cannot find it when they search at the moment of the question. We cover the usual causes in why your website is not showing up on Google.
- The service pages are generic and never say clearly what you offer, to whom, and in which country.
- Nobody outside your own site mentions your name, so the engine has nothing to confirm what you say about yourself.
- The company name is spelled several different ways, or only in English while the question is asked in Arabic.
- A firewall is blocking AI crawlers without your knowledge.
Structured data helps make your company's identity clear, and we go through the right types in our guide to schema structured data. Always start with the first cause, though. If search engines cannot find your site, the other steps will not help much.
How do you measure whether AI tools mention you?
Measuring this is harder than measuring SEO. Write a list of ten to twenty questions your customers ask, put them to more than one AI tool every month, and record whether your name came up. In your analytics tool, track visits coming from chatgpt.com and perplexity.ai. And ask every new client how they heard about you, with "an AI tool" added to the options.
We apply these steps as part of our search and AI visibility service. For showing up in your own city, read how to show up on Google Maps.
Questions our partners ask
Does GEO replace SEO?
No. Many answer engines search the web at the moment of the question and rely on search engine indexes, so a site that is weak in search is weak in AI answers too. GEO is a layer on top of solid SEO.
Is llms.txt an official standard?
No. It is an open proposal from 2024 for summarizing a site for language models, and not every engine has said it uses it. It is easy to add and does no harm, but it will not make up for weak content.
Should I block AI crawlers from my site?
That is a business decision. Blocking them means these tools will not read your content or mention it. For a service company that wants to be known, we usually recommend allowing them.
Written by the Visual Innovate team, the people who build, host and follow up systems, websites and apps for our clients in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Egypt.
