GEO and AEO Explained: Why ChatGPT Does Not Mention Your Business, and the Five Checks That Fix It
Written after running our own audit tool on our own site and getting zero mentions in three ChatGPT prompts.
Quick Answer
GEO (generative engine optimisation) and AEO (answer engine optimisation) are the work of becoming a source that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews quote when someone asks a buying question. Five things decide it: whether the AI crawlers can reach your site, whether your structured data actually parses, whether your pages answer the question in the first paragraph, whether the machine knows which business you are, and whether anyone other than you says you are good. Most businesses fail the first two without knowing; the fifth is the slowest to fix and matters most.
Three Acronyms, One Job
SEO earns you a position on a list of links. AEO earns you the answer itself: the featured snippet, the People Also Ask box, the voice-assistant reply, the AI Overview at the top of Google. GEO earns you a place inside an answer that a model writes from scratch, in ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity, where there may be no list of links at all.
The overlap is large. Crawl access, valid schema, clear answers and a well-defined entity are the foundation of all three. What changes with generative engines is the unit of selection: not the page but the passage, and not just your site but everything the model can find about you. That shifts the emphasis toward specifics and corroboration, and away from keyword density.
The Five Checks
1. Can the AI crawlers reach you at all?
The most common failure is the least visible. A New Zealand marketing agency we audited had a robots.txt blocking eight AI crawlers, including GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended. As far as anyone there knew, nobody had chosen that; Cloudflare's "manage AI crawlers" setting had written it for them. Every ChatGPT prompt we tested came back without them. The fix took a settings change. Our tool checks 19 search and AI crawlers against robots.txt and the live response, because a 403 from a firewall counts the same as a Disallow line.
2. Is your structured data valid, or just present?
Schema markup is how you tell a machine "this is a business, here is its phone number, these are its FAQs" without asking it to infer. The same agency had FAQPage schema on ten service pages, all broken: a tooltip plugin was injecting HTML inside the JSON-LD, so every block failed to parse. Google's testing tool showed it. Nobody had run the tool. Presence is not validity; the audit parses every block on every page.
3. Does the page answer the question in the first paragraph?
Generated answers are assembled from passages, not pages. A passage that states a price, a timeframe, a yes-or-no and a reason is quotable; a passage that says "we offer bespoke solutions tailored to your needs" is not. On this site every service page opens with the price, the timeframe and the proof, and carries a FAQ block that answers what buyers actually type. When we asked Google's AI Mode about our own company, its answer was built almost entirely from those passages and our case studies.
4. Does the machine know which business you are?
Google merged us with a waste-management company that shares two words of our name, and showed their staff photo in an AI result about us. The fix was entity work: Organization schema with the legal name, a disambiguating description that says plainly what we are not, a founder Person entity with a photo, links to our LinkedIn, X and Google Business Profile, and the same in llms.txt. If your name is shared, generic, or a common word, assume the machine is confused until you have told it otherwise.
5. Does anyone other than you say it?
When an AI is asked "are they any good?", it looks for sources that are not you. Our own AI Mode transcript cited our website, our LinkedIn, and the Companies Office register, and nothing else, because that is all there was. Google reviews on a Business Profile, a LinkedIn company page, a Clutch listing, a client who names you in their own case study: each is a source the AI can lean on. This is the slowest of the five to build and the one that decides "legit or not".
What Our Own Audit Said
We run the same audit on wastedmyult.com that we sell, and publish it. The AI section scored 91 out of 100: all 19 crawlers allowed, structured data on every page, llms.txt in place, FAQ blocks on every service page. And ChatGPT still named us in zero of three buyer prompts, and Google showed an AI Overview on four of six money keywords with us cited in none of them.
That is the honest shape of GEO for a small business: checks one to four are table stakes you can complete in a week, and they get you to eligible, not chosen. Being chosen is check five, and it is earned in months, through reviews, a Business Profile, client sites that name you, and content specific enough that a model prefers your passage to a competitor's. The audit tells you which of the five you are failing; the report is at /audits/wastedmyult-self-audit.
What to Do This Week
Open yoursite.com/robots.txt. If you see GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot or OAI-SearchBot under Disallow and did not put them there, find the setting that did (Cloudflare, a security plugin) and turn it off.
Paste each key page into Google's Rich Results Test. Red means the block is not being read; fix or remove it.
Rewrite the first paragraph of each service page so it states what you do, for whom, where, from what price, in how long. Then add the three questions buyers ask, with plain answers.
Search your business name. If Google shows another company's image, address or description, add legalName, a disambiguatingDescription and sameAs links to your Organization schema, and claim your Business Profile.
Ask three clients for a Google review this month. Ask ChatGPT your three buyer prompts today, save the answers, and ask again in ninety days.
Key Takeaways
- GEO and AEO share most of their foundation with SEO; the difference is passages over pages and corroboration over keywords.
- Crawler blocks are usually accidental. A hosting or security setting can opt you out of ChatGPT without telling you.
- Schema that does not parse is worse than none: it looks done and does nothing.
- Answer-first paragraphs with prices, timeframes and proof are what get quoted.
- If your name is shared or generic, do the entity work or the machine will pick the wrong you.
- Third-party sources decide "are they any good". Reviews and a Business Profile are the fastest to start.
FAQ
What is GEO (generative engine optimisation)?
Making your business one of the sources a generative AI draws on when it writes an answer. ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews all build answers from pages they can crawl and trust. GEO is the work of being crawlable, clear, specific and corroborated enough to be picked.
What is the difference between AEO, GEO and SEO?
SEO earns a ranking on a results page. AEO (answer engine optimisation) earns the direct answer: featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice results, AI Overviews. GEO earns a place in a generated answer where there may be no results page at all. In practice they share about 80% of the work: crawl access, structured data, answer-first content and a clear entity. The other 20% is what this article is about.
How do I check whether ChatGPT mentions my business?
Ask it the three things a buyer would ask before hiring you, in your city, with search enabled: "best [service] in [city]", "who should I hire for [problem]", "[service] cost in [city]". Note who it names and which sites it cites. Our audit tool does this and records the answers; on our own site the result was zero mentions in three prompts, which is why we wrote this.
Does blocking GPTBot stop me appearing in Google?
No. GPTBot is OpenAI's crawler and Googlebot is Google's; blocking one does not affect the other. Note that Google-Extended controls whether Google may use your content for Gemini training and grounding, not whether you appear in Search or AI Overviews, which follow Googlebot. If a Cloudflare or WordPress setting has blocked "AI bots" for you, you have quietly opted out of ChatGPT and Claude while staying in Google.
Does llms.txt actually do anything?
No major engine has confirmed it reads the file, so treat it as cheap insurance rather than a lever. It costs ten minutes, it gives an AI a clean plain-text summary of who you are and what you sell, and it can only help. We publish one; the audit checks for it but does not score it heavily.
Related Reading
React SPA SEO Guide
If crawlers see an empty shell, none of the five checks matter. How we prerender every route.
WordPress vs Custom
Where broken schema and accidental crawler blocks tend to come from.
About: the entity work in practice
The Organization and Person schema we used to separate ourselves from a similarly named company.
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