When someone asks an AI assistant to recommend a digital marketing agency in Delhi, or a supplier, or a tool, it produces a short list. Being on that list is now a distribution channel. Generative Engine Optimization, GEO, is the work of becoming a source those systems can understand, trust and name.
It is a narrower job than it sounds, and most of it is unglamorous.
How an AI answer actually gets built
Roughly, three things have to happen before you appear in one.
- Access. A crawler has to be allowed to fetch your pages, and has to be able to render them. Content that only exists after JavaScript execution, or that sits behind a robots.txt block, is not in the pool at all.
- Comprehension. The system has to work out what your business is, what it does, and where. Ambiguity is resolved by omission.
- Selection. Among the sources it understands, it picks the ones that read as authoritative and specific on that exact question.
Almost every GEO failure is a failure at step one or two, not step three. Businesses worry about competing on authority while their content is not even eligible.
Step one: be reachable
Check your robots.txt for what it says about AI crawlers. The relevant user agents include GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot for OpenAI, ClaudeBot for Anthropic, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, and Applebot-Extended, among others. Many sites block these by accident, inheriting a template or a plugin default, and then wonder why they are never mentioned.
This is a genuine decision with two defensible answers. Blocking protects your content from being summarised without a visit. Allowing gives you a chance of being cited and recommended. For a business that sells services, being findable is usually worth more than being withheld. Whichever you choose, choose it on purpose.
Also worth adding: an llms.txt file. It is a short markdown brief at your domain root that states what your organisation is, what it offers and where the important pages are, so a model can read a clean summary instead of inferring structure from HTML.
Step two: be unambiguous
This is where most of the return is, and it is mostly structured data plus consistency.
Build one connected entity, not scattered fragments
Organization and LocalBusiness schema with a real address and coordinates, a defined service catalogue, the topics you claim expertise in, and links to your profiles elsewhere. Critically, connect the nodes with @id references so the markup reads as one business rather than several unrelated objects on the same page.
Keep your details identical everywhere
Name, address and phone number should match exactly across your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory. Variations look like different businesses to a machine and dilute the confidence it has in any of them.
State facts plainly
Models quote sentences that assert something specific. “We serve Delhi NCR including Dwarka, Noida and Gurugram” is quotable. “We serve clients across the region” is not. Put the concrete version on the page.
Step three: be worth selecting
Once you are readable and understood, selection comes down to depth and corroboration.
Depth on a topic beats breadth across topics. A site with eight substantial pieces on local SEO reads as an authority on local SEO. A site with one thin post each on twelve subjects reads as an authority on nothing.
Being described elsewhere matters. Models are trained and grounded on the wider web, not just your site. Mentions in directories, industry publications, podcasts and genuine editorial coverage are what corroborate your own claims. This is the part that cannot be shortcut, and it overlaps almost entirely with old-fashioned digital PR.
Freshness carries weight on time-sensitive questions. Keep dates accurate and update pages when the facts change, rather than backdating for appearances.
What GEO is not
It is not keyword stuffing for robots. It is not a plugin. It is not a way to appear authoritative without being it, because the corroboration step is outside your control. And it is not separate from SEO: a site that is technically broken for Google is broken for every other crawler too.
Frequently asked questions
Can I pay to appear in AI answers?
Not for the cited sources in an organic answer. Some assistants carry separate advertising, but that is labelled placement, not citation. Anyone selling guaranteed inclusion in AI recommendations is selling something they cannot deliver.
How do I check whether AI tools already mention my business?
Ask them, in the words your buyers would use, and note who gets named and which pages get linked. Repeat with variations, because answers are not deterministic. Also check your server logs or analytics for the AI crawler user agents, which tells you whether you are being fetched at all.
Is llms.txt actually used by anything yet?
Adoption is still early and no major provider has committed to it as a ranking input. It costs very little to publish, it does no harm, and it forces you to write a clear, factual summary of your business, which is useful on its own terms. Treat it as cheap insurance rather than a lever.
Does GEO help my normal Google rankings too?
Most of it does, because most of it is crawlability, structured data, entity consistency and topical depth. Those are the same inputs classic SEO rewards, which is why GEO is best treated as an extension of the same programme rather than a separate budget.
What is the single highest-return GEO task?
Making your entity unambiguous. A complete, internally linked Organization and LocalBusiness schema, with details that match your Google Business Profile exactly, does more than any amount of content rewriting, because it moves you from “probably a business” to “this specific business”.
A sensible starting order
Check crawler access. Fix your entity markup. Make your details consistent. Then pick one topic you genuinely want to own and go deep on it, rather than adding another shallow page to a wide pile.
If you want this audited on your own domain, see how we handle GEO or get in touch.