What is GEO, and how can an AI assistant find your website?
A guide to generative engine optimisation, with referral and contact figures from ten websites.
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) means making it easier for tools such as ChatGPT, Alice, Gemini and Perplexity to find and cite information on your site. Here’s how we approach it and what we saw in our analytics.
Where can an AI assistant find an answer?
Consider a buyer asking, “Where can I buy MTU parts for delivery to Türkiye?” A search-enabled assistant can look up suppliers and link to the pages it uses. A page that names the part, the supplier and the delivery area gives it specific information to work with.
What makes a page useful as a source?
- A direct answer. Start with the answer. For a parts query, that might be a compatible model number or a delivery estimate.
- Specifics. Brands, models, part numbers, cities, prices, lead times.
- Text in HTML. If a page is assembled by JavaScript in the browser, a bot may see an empty page.
- schema.org markup. Identify the organisation, products and services in structured data that matches what visitors can read.
- Mentions elsewhere. Independent reviews and directory listings give buyers other places to check the company’s details.
What we saw across ten sites
In five months we recorded 87 visits from AI assistants, about 1% of traffic. A contact goal fired in 26 of those visits, or about 30%. The overall rate was 6.5%. On IWH’s spare-parts site, the figure for ChatGPT referrals was 37.7%.
Why might these visitors be more likely to get in touch?
A buyer following a supplier recommendation may already know which part they need. That could help explain the higher rate. With only 87 visits from AI assistants, we would check a larger sample before using 30% to forecast enquiries.
Where to start
- Check that your site is indexed by Google, Bing and Yandex.
- Ask ChatGPT what your buyer would ask and see whom it names.
- Build a page for each such question: product, country or city, terms.
- Add markup and an llms.txt file.
- Set up Metrica or Analytics goals and watch referrals from chatgpt.com, gemini.google.com, perplexity.ai.
Questions and answers
How is GEO different from SEO?
SEO helps buyers find your pages in search engines. GEO focuses on making the information on those pages clear enough for an assistant to use and cite. Both benefit from accessible pages and accurate product information.
How much traffic do AI assistants bring?
About 1% in our sample. Visits from AI assistants triggered a contact goal 4.6 times as often as the average visit across the ten sites.