How to Get Your Website Cited by ChatGPT: A GEO Playbook

Picture ChatGPT as the world’s busiest research assistant. Millions of people hand it a question, it skims the web in seconds, and it comes back with an answer and a few sources. Your goal is simple to say and harder to do: be one of those sources.

That is what Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is about. Here is the playbook I use, in the order I use it.

Step 1: Can ChatGPT even reach your site?

You cannot be cited by a crawler you have locked out. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and look for these user agents:

• OAI-SearchBot: used to show websites in ChatGPT search. Block this and you are invisible there.
• ChatGPT-User: used when a person asks ChatGPT to visit a page.
• GPTBot: used to collect training data. This is a separate business decision.

Many sites block all three by accident, often through a security plugin or a copy pasted rule. Also check your CDN or firewall: a bot challenge page looks like a wall to a crawler.

Step 2: Rank where the answers come from

Generative engines do not invent sources out of nowhere. When ChatGPT searches the web, it leans on pages that already rank and are easy to retrieve. That is why GEO starts with ordinary SEO: indexable pages, fast load times, clean titles and a site structure that makes sense.

If your money page sits on page four of Google, fix that first. It is the cheapest GEO win you will ever get.

Step 3: Make your facts unmistakable

AI models stitch answers together from many sources. If your company is described five different ways across the web, the model has to guess, and guesses rarely favour you.

Make the important facts boringly consistent:

1. Same brand name, location and description on your site, LinkedIn and directories.
2. Organization and Person schema in JSON-LD, with sameAs links to your official profiles.
3. An About page that answers “who is this, what do they do, where are they” in the first paragraph.

Think of it as entity SEO: you are teaching machines exactly who you are.

Step 4: Write answers worth quoting

Here is the part most brands skip. AI assistants quote passages, not pages. A passage gets quoted when it is:

• Direct: the answer comes first, the context second.
• Specific: a number, a definition, a named step. “Improves performance” is invisible; “cut LCP from 4.1s to 1.8s” is quotable.
• Self contained: it still makes sense when lifted out of the page.

A practical trick: under each question heading, write a 40 to 60 word answer that could be read aloud on its own. Then expand below it.

Step 5: Give agents a clean copy

Two small additions help AI agents read your site cheaply:

• An llms.txt file at your root that summarises who you are and links your key pages.
• Markdown versions of important pages, served when an agent asks for text/markdown.

Neither is a magic switch. Both remove friction, and friction is what makes a crawler move on.

Step 6: Measure, then repeat

GEO without measurement is just hope. Each month:

1. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini the ten questions your buyers ask. Note whether you are mentioned, cited with a link, or missing.
2. In GA4, check sessions from chatgpt.com and other AI assistants.
3. Improve the pages that should have been cited and were not.

The short version

Let the bots in. Rank in normal search. Be consistent about who you are. Write the clearest answer on the internet for the questions that matter to you. That is the whole game, and most of your competitors are not playing it yet.

If you want a baseline of where AI tools mention your brand today, ask me for a free mini audit or read more about my GEO services.