GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the process of optimizing a website for AI-powered search tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar platforms. Unlike traditional search engines, these tools don’t present users with a list of ten results. Instead, they generate an answer and cite the sources they consider most relevant.
The goal of GEO is to make sure your website is among those sources. We applied this approach to our own website and then measured the results. Below, we’ll show you exactly what we did and what we achieved.
How is GEO different from SEO?
SEO focuses on a website’s position in search results, while the goal of GEO is to have your content recognized as a relevant source and cited in an AI-generated answer. The good news is that the fundamentals overlap to a large extent: a website that loads quickly, has a clear structure, and provides direct answers to users’ questions is well positioned for both.
The main difference lies in how the content is used. AI tools extract specific information from content, so it’s important that the answer is clearly written, machine-readable, and supported by reliable information about the author and the organization behind it.
That’s why GEO shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for SEO, but rather as an extension of it. The optimizations we made for AI search also contribute to a stronger overall SEO strategy.
Do AI searches even read your website?
Before making any changes, we first checked what was already happening on the server. In just under 12 days, we recorded 950 requests from ClaudeBot, 610 from GPTBot, and 274 from PerplexityBot. In other words, AI bots were already actively accessing our website. During the same period, ChatGPT also brought us our first nine visitors through links included in its responses.
For AI tools to access and use a website’s content in the first place, two basic conditions need to be met. First, the robots.txt file must not block their bots — in our case, all of them are allowed. Second, the content needs to be available directly in the HTML, without requiring JavaScript execution. Our website is static, so bots receive the complete page content immediately and can read it without client-side rendering.
What exactly did we do on our own website?
We added structured data to every page. The Organization and WebSite nodes contain key information about the company, including its founding year, tax ID, contact details, and areas of expertise. We also added FAQ structured data to 14 service and solution pages, while articles include Article structured data. Everything was implemented in all three languages.
Dates are clearly visible and machine-readable. Every article includes a publication date, and whenever the content is updated, we also include the date of the latest update. This allows both readers and AI tools to understand when the content was last changed.
We also added an llms.txt file to the website root — an overview of the entire site with short descriptions of each page. It is generated from the same data used to build the website, giving AI tools a clear content map in a format suited to this type of search.
The most important change, however, was to the content itself. Each of the eight web solutions pages now starts with a short introductory paragraph of 40 to 80 words that immediately explains what the solution is, who it is intended for, and what it includes. This gives AI tools a clear, self-contained answer that they can easily understand, extract, and cite as a source.
What of this applies to your website?
These principles can be applied to almost any website, regardless of the industry. AI bots need to be allowed to access the site through robots.txt, content should be served as clean HTML, the company and its key information should be described using structured data, publication and update dates should be clearly stated, and, most importantly, every important page should provide a direct answer to the question that page exists to address.
We build AI search optimization into the websites we create, while our SEO services can bring existing websites up to the same standard. The technical foundation, high-quality content, and measurement of results all need to work together. If you’d like us to check how your website appears in AI search results, get in touch with us.