AI search optimisation (GEO)

How AI assistants decide what to say about you

When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews a question, the answer is built from pages the system has crawled or retrieves at that moment. If its crawler is blocked in your robots.txt, your site is not in the picture. If your pages bury the facts in long marketing paragraphs, the assistant takes them from somewhere else, often a directory, a review site or a competitor's comparison page.

So the first job is access. Many sites block these crawlers by accident, through a security plugin or a copied robots file. Others block them on purpose without weighing the cost. We list every relevant crawler, show what yours allows, and let you decide. Some businesses have good reasons to block training crawlers while still allowing the ones that fetch pages to answer live questions, and the rules can separate the two.

The second job is clarity. Assistants tend to quote short passages that answer a question directly. A page that opens with its answer in two plain sentences, then supports it, is easier to cite than one that builds up to it. We restructure priority pages that way, without turning them into lists of questions.

Measuring something with no search console

There is no official report showing how often an assistant mentions your business. Answers also change with how the question is phrased, who is asking and when. Anyone showing you a single screenshot as proof is showing you one roll of the dice.

Our approach is a fixed set of prompts written from your customers' real questions, run across the main assistants on a set schedule, with every answer saved. That gives a baseline and lets you compare like with like over time. We also note which outside sources the assistants cite for your topic. Often the quickest improvement is correcting your details on those sites, not changing your own.

• Is the business mentioned at all for the core buying questions
• Are its facts correct: services, locations, prices, founding details
• Which sources the answer cites, and whether yours is among them
• How the answer describes you compared with named competitors