GEO: How to Get Your Business Cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity

I asked ChatGPT to recommend AI consultants in Las Vegas last month. My business showed up. Most of the businesses I know in that space did not.

That's not an accident. I built my site to be cited by AI search engines. The businesses that didn't show up built their sites for Google. Those are two different problems now.

AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews handle billions of queries every month. The traffic they send converts at 14.2%, compared to 2.8% from traditional Google results. And most businesses have done nothing to appear in these responses.

This post breaks down exactly what I did, why it works, and what you can do this week to start showing up.

What Is GEO

GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It's the practice of making your business recognizable, quotable, and citable by AI search engines.

Traditional SEO is about ranking on a list. You optimize a page, Google puts it at position 3 or position 17, and people scroll down and click.

AI search doesn't work that way. There is no list. The AI reads hundreds of sources, synthesizes an answer, and cites the sources it found most useful. You're either cited or you're invisible. There is no "page two."

GEO is how you become one of those cited sources. It involves three things: making your content machine-readable, making your brand a known entity, and formatting your expertise so AI prefers to quote it.

Why AI Search Matters Right Now

Here's what most people get wrong about AI search: they think it's a future problem. It's not. It's a right-now problem.

ChatGPT has over 400 million weekly users. Perplexity processes millions of queries daily. Google AI Overviews now appear on over 30% of search results. When someone asks these tools "who can help me automate my business with AI," the answer they get is the only answer that matters.

The conversion numbers tell the story. AI search traffic converts at 14.2%. Google organic traffic converts at 2.8%. That's a 5x difference. The reason is simple: people who get a direct recommendation from an AI trust it more than picking from a list of ten blue links.

Here's the problem. Google ranks pages. AI cites sources. Those require completely different optimization strategies. A page that ranks #1 on Google might never get cited by ChatGPT because the AI can't parse its structure, doesn't recognize the brand, or finds the content too generic to quote.

The Three Pillars of GEO

After testing this on my own site and several client sites, GEO comes down to three things:

1. llms.txt -- A machine-readable file that tells AI exactly what your business does
2. Structured data and schema markup -- The technical layer that makes your content parseable
3. Citation-ready content -- Formatting your expertise so AI prefers to quote you over competitors

Most businesses have none of these. Some have basic schema markup. Almost nobody has all three working together.

llms.txt: Your AI Resume

An llms.txt file lives at the root of your domain (yoursite.com/llms.txt). It's a plain text file written specifically for AI crawlers.

Think of robots.txt. That file tells search engine crawlers what they can and can't access. An llms.txt file does something different. It tells AI models who you are, what you do, what topics you're an authority on, and where to find your best content.

Here's what a good llms.txt includes:

• Business name, location, and what you do in plain language
• Your core services with brief descriptions
• Key topics you're an authority on
• Links to your most important content
• Your credentials and what makes you different

My site at justinharris.ai has one. It lists every service I offer, links to my best blog posts, describes my expertise, and provides context about who I serve. When an AI model crawls my site, it gets a clean summary of everything it needs to cite me accurately.

Without this file, AI models have to piece together who you are from scattered pages, inconsistent formatting, and generic boilerplate. They often get it wrong. Or they skip you entirely.

Schema Markup That AI Actually Reads

Schema markup (structured data) has been around for years in traditional SEO. Most businesses either skip it or add the bare minimum: maybe an Organization schema and a basic Article schema.

For GEO, you need more. AI models use structured data to understand relationships between entities. The richer your schema, the easier it is for AI to parse your content and cite you confidently.

Here's what I run on justinharris.ai:

• Person schema -- Who Justin Harris is, credentials, expertise areas, social profiles
• Organization schema -- Business name, location, services offered, founding date
• LocalBusiness schema -- Physical location, service area, hours, contact information
• Service schema -- Each service with detailed descriptions, pricing indicators, and target audience
• FAQ schema -- Common questions with direct, quotable answers on every relevant page
• Article schema -- Author attribution, publish dates, and topic categorization for every blog post

The key principle: give the AI more context than it needs. When an AI model encounters a page with rich, interconnected schema, it can confidently attribute expertise, verify facts, and generate citations. When it encounters a page with minimal markup, it moves on to a source that's easier to parse.

If you're running a service business, start with Person, Organization, and Service schema. Add FAQ schema to your top pages. That alone puts you ahead of 90% of competitors.

Writing Content That AI Wants to Quote

This is where most businesses lose. They write content for humans browsing Google results. AI engines have different preferences.

AI models prefer to cite content that is:

• Specific and data-driven."AI search traffic converts at 14.2%" is quotable. "AI search is really effective" is not.
• Directly answering questions. Pages that start with clear answers, then expand with detail, get cited more than pages that bury the answer in paragraph eight.
• Structured with clear headings. H2s and H3s that match common questions make it easy for AI to extract the right section.
• Attributed to a real person. Content with clear authorship, credentials, and first-person expertise signals gets cited over anonymous corporate content.
• Organized with lists and definitions. AI models find it easier to extract and reformat structured content than dense paragraphs.

I tested this. I restructured three pages on my site. I moved the direct answer to the top, added specific numbers, and broke sections into question-and-answer format. Within six weeks, two of those pages started appearing in ChatGPT and Perplexity responses for their target queries.

The formatting matters as much as the content itself. If an AI model has to parse through 2,000 words of unstructured text to find your key point, it will cite a competitor who put that point in a clear heading with a direct answer underneath.

Entity Optimization: Making AI Recognize Your Brand

Here's something most people skip entirely. AI models don't just read your website. They build an understanding of your brand from every source they can find.

When ChatGPT decides whether to mention your business, it checks: Does this brand show up consistently across the web? Is the information about them consistent? Are they mentioned by other credible sources?

This is entity optimization. Making your brand a recognized entity in the AI's knowledge base. Here's what feeds into it:

• Google Business Profile. Fully filled out, with services, descriptions, photos, and regular updates. AI models pull from this heavily.
• LinkedIn. Your personal profile and company page with detailed descriptions matching your website.
• Industry directories. Consistent NAP (name, address, phone) across every directory your business is listed in.
• Reviews. Google reviews, industry-specific review sites. AI models use review content to understand what you do and how well you do it.
• Mentions and backlinks. When other sites mention your brand, that reinforces your entity in AI models. Guest posts, interviews, and case studies on third-party sites all count.
• Wikipedia and knowledge panels.If you can get a knowledge panel or a mention in relevant Wikipedia articles, that's a strong entity signal.

The principle is consistency. If your website says you're an AI consultant in Las Vegas, your LinkedIn says you're a tech advisor, and your Google Business Profile says you do marketing automation, the AI model gets confused. It won't cite a brand it can't confidently categorize.

Make every platform tell the same story. Same services, same positioning, same language.

What to Do Right Now

You don't need to overhaul your entire site. Start with these four steps this week:

1. Audit your AI visibility.Open ChatGPT and Perplexity. Ask them about your service category in your city. Ask them to recommend businesses that do what you do. If you don't appear, you now know the size of the problem.
2. Create an llms.txt file. Write a plain text summary of your business: who you are, what you do, who you serve, and your best content. Place it at yoursite.com/llms.txt. This is the single highest-impact action for AI visibility.
3. Expand your schema markup. At minimum, add Person, Organization, and Service schema to your homepage. Add FAQ schema to your top 5 pages. Use Google's Rich Results Test to validate your markup.
4. Restructure your top 3 pages. Move the direct answer to the top of each section. Add specific numbers. Break content into clear question-and-answer pairs. Make it easy for an AI to extract a quote.

If you want the full picture of how your site performs across both traditional SEO and AI search, that's exactly what I cover in my free AI revenue audit. I look at your current rankings, your AI visibility, your schema, your entity signals, and give you a prioritized list of what to fix.

GEO is not a replacement for AI-powered SEO. It's the next layer on top. The businesses winning right now are the ones optimizing for both Google and AI engines simultaneously. If you're only doing one, you're leaving traffic on the table.

For a detailed breakdown of what to look for in a consultant who handles both, check out my guide to choosing an AI consultant. And if you want to see what full GEO optimization looks like when it's done right, that's one of the services I offer.

The window is open right now. Most businesses haven't started. The ones that move first will own the AI citations in their category. Once those positions are established, they compound. Every citation reinforces the next one.

I tested this. Here's what happened: my site went from invisible in AI search to being cited for multiple competitive queries in under 90 days. The playbook works.

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