GEO: How to Get ChatGPT and Gemini to Recommend Your Business

More people now ask an AI tool for a recommendation instead of scrolling a list of links. They type "best web designer in Phuket" or "who can build a multilingual site for my hotel" into ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or a Google AI answer, and they get a short reply with a few names.

If your business is one of those names, you win a lead. If it is not, you may never know the question was asked.

The practice of earning those mentions is called generative engine optimization, or GEO. This post explains how it works and what you can do about it. It also explains what nobody can promise yet.

How AI tools choose which businesses to mention

No one outside these companies knows the exact rules, and they change. But from how these tools behave, a few things are clear.

AI answers come from two places. The first is what the model learned during training. The second is live information the tool fetches from the web when it answers. Perplexity and Google's AI answers lean heavily on live results. ChatGPT and Gemini also use web search for many questions.

When a tool picks which business to mention, it tends to favor sources that are:

• Clear about who the business is and what it does
• Consistent across many places on the web
• Specific, with real facts such as prices, places and dates
• Mentioned or reviewed by other trusted sites
• Easy for a machine to read

That list is the whole game. GEO is mostly about making your business easy to understand, easy to verify and easy to quote.

Step 1: State the basic facts clearly

An AI tool cannot recommend a business it cannot describe. Put the plain facts on your site, in plain sentences:

• Business name, spelled the same way everywhere
• Where you are based and where you serve
• What you sell, in words customers use
• Starting prices or price ranges
• How to contact you

Do not hide these in an image or a slider. Write them as text on an About page, a services page and your home page. If a stranger could not summarize your business in two sentences after reading your site, a machine cannot either.

Step 2: Make your details match everywhere

Your business name, address, phone number and description should read the same on your website, your Google Business Profile, your social pages and any directory that lists you. When sources disagree, AI tools lose confidence and may skip you.

Audit this once. Search your business name, open every listing, and fix anything that does not match.

Step 3: Add FAQ content and schema markup

People ask AI tools questions. Pages that answer questions directly are easier to quote. Add a short FAQ section to your key pages, with real questions from real customers and short, honest answers.

Then add schema markup. Schema is structured data in the page code that labels your business name, address, services, reviews and FAQs in a format machines read without guessing. It does not guarantee a mention. It removes confusion about what your page says.

Step 4: Publish an llms.txt file

The llms.txt file is a simple text file at the root of your site that gives AI tools a short, clean summary of your business and points to your most important pages. It is a proposed convention, not a rule, and no AI company has promised to follow it. Still, it takes little time to write and does no harm. We treat it as a cheap extra, not a magic switch.

Step 5: Create pages that can be cited

AI tools like to quote content that contains specific, checkable facts. Vague claims give them nothing to use.

Compare these two lines:

• "We offer affordable packages."
• "Our Launch package starts at $1,900 and our Global package, with five languages, starts at $14,000."

The second can be quoted. The first cannot. Put numbers on your pages. Add the date you last checked them. Keep them updated. A page with a current price and a clear date is more trustworthy to people and to machines.

Write in short sentences. Use headings that match real questions. Put the answer at the top of each section.

Step 6: Earn mentions and reviews on other sites

AI tools do not rely only on what you say about yourself. They look for what others say. Reviews on Google, mentions in local news, listings in industry directories, guest articles and customer stories all count as outside evidence.

You cannot fake this, and you should not try. Ask real customers for honest reviews. Get listed where your real buyers look. Contribute useful knowledge to places where your industry gathers. Over time, that builds a trail of independent mentions.

Step 7: Serve people in their own language

AI tools answer in the language of the question. A traveller who asks in German looks for German sources. If your business has only English pages, you are invisible to that question.

Build real pages in each language your customers use, with their own URLs and proper hreflang tags, not a translation plugin that overlays text. Translate the facts, the prices and the FAQs. Have a native speaker check the result. For a business serving tourists or overseas buyers, this step often matters most.

Be honest about the limits

GEO is new. The tools change often, and the companies behind them do not publish how they choose. We cannot tell you that these steps will put you in ChatGPT's answers by next month. Nobody can.

What we can say is this. Every step above also helps normal search, helps customers who find you directly and makes your business easier to trust. The work is useful even if the AI part takes time. Be wary of anyone who sells guaranteed AI rankings.

A sensible approach is to do the steps, then test. Ask the major tools questions your customers would ask, note whether your business appears, and repeat every month. Treat it as a measurement, not a promise.

Where to start

If you do only three things this week, do these:

• Write a clear, factual description of your business and put it on your site.
• Make your name, address and details match across every listing.
• Add real prices and a last-checked date to your main service pages.

Then work down the list.

Talk to us

Oracles Art builds websites and search setups for businesses in the US, UK, Australia, Europe and Thailand, with GEO built in from the start. If you want to know where your business stands and what to fix first, message Oracles Art on WhatsApp and we will send you a quote.