How to Get Found by ChatGPT and Google AI (GEO in 2026)
If you want ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews to cite your website, write content that AI engines like to quote: clear answers up front, real statistics with named sources, and quotes from experts. In testing, content built that way earned up to 40% more visibility in AI answers (Aggarwal et al., GEO, KDD 2024). Old-school keyword stuffing did worse than doing nothing at all.
What changed about getting found?
For twenty years, "getting found" meant ranking on Google and earning a click. That's changing. Google's AI Overviews, the AI summary at the top of the results page, appeared on roughly 15–18% of searches in late 2025 (Semrush, 2025). Fewer people click through when that summary appears: Ahrefs measured a 34.5% drop in clicks for the top organic result (Ahrefs, 2025). Seer Interactive measured a 54.6% year-on-year drop across all positions (Seer Interactive, 2025).
Alongside ranking on Google, you now want to be the source the AI quotes. That's what people mean by GEO, or Generative Engine Optimization.
How do you get cited by AI engines?
The most useful evidence comes from researchers at Princeton, Georgia Tech, Allen AI and IIT Delhi. Their study, presented at KDD 2024, tested nine ways of writing across 10,000 queries, and three stood out (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024):
- Citing sources, with links to credible references in the text: +30–40% visibility
- Adding quotations that an AI can lift word for word: +30–40% visibility
- Adding statistics, meaning specific numbers in place of vague claims: +30–40% visibility
The researchers then tested the same techniques on the live Perplexity.ai engine, where they improved visibility by 22–37% (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024). The headline 40% came from a lab engine. The effect was confirmed only on Perplexity, not on Google AI Overviews or ChatGPT. Still, AI models generally favour well-sourced, specific writing, so it's a sound bet across engines.
Content with citations, statistics and quotations earned up to 40% more visibility in AI answers, while keyword stuffing scored about 10% worse than doing nothing (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).
Every page we build opens with a direct answer and names the sources behind its numbers.
What does "answer first" mean?
AI engines quote the part of your page that answers the question fastest. So put the answer in the first sentence and explain underneath. It's the old journalist's "inverted pyramid", and it suits the way these systems extract text.
In practice that means:
- A one- or two-sentence answer at the very top of the page
- Question-style headings that match how people ask
- Short paragraphs, lists and tables instead of dense walls of text
- Specific figures: "34.5% fewer clicks" beats "significantly fewer clicks"
It also helps to know who you're up against. In Google AI Overviews (US, March 2025), the three most-cited sources were Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit. Government sites were cited about 3× more than you'd expect from their share of results (Pew Research Center, 2025). You probably won't beat Wikipedia, but you can be the clearest, best-sourced answer in your niche.
Does speed still matter for AI and Google?
Yes, though it matters more for trust and conversions than for rankings. Core Web Vitals, Google's speed and stability scores, are a confirmed ranking signal, but they mostly act as a tiebreaker (Search Engine Journal, 2025). Google's targets are an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, an INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and a CLS of 0.1 or less (Google, 2025).
The bigger payoff is commercial. In Google's own case studies, Vodafone saw an 8% sales lift after a 31% improvement in load time, and Redbus saw mobile conversions rise 80–100% (web.dev, 2024). These are before-and-after studies, not controlled experiments, so read the numbers as strong signals rather than guarantees. We treat fast load times as a build rule, partly for ranking and mostly because slow pages cost sales. The details are on our how we build websites page.
What about schema and llms.txt?
A few technical pieces help AI and search engines understand your site:
- Schema markup (structured data) feeds Google's Knowledge Graph and rich results. Organization, Article, BreadcrumbList and Product are the types still worth doing (Google, 2025). AI crawlers don't run JavaScript, so schema has to sit in the static HTML instead of being injected by a tag manager (Ahrefs, 2025).
- llms.txt is a simple file that lists your key pages in plain Markdown for AI engines. Over 1,000 sites use it, including Stripe and Cloudflare (llmstxt.site, 2025). There's no proof yet that it lifts citations, but it's cheap to add, so we think it's worth doing.
FAQ
What is GEO?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: shaping your website so AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews quote it in their answers. Citations, statistics and clear quotable writing have the strongest evidence so far (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).
Is SEO dead now that AI answers questions?
No. Traditional Google search still drives most organic traffic. But when AI Overviews appear, they already cut clicks by up to 34.5% for the top result (Ahrefs, 2025), so being the cited source matters more each year.
Should I block ChatGPT and other AI bots?
For visibility, allow the search bots (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot) so you appear in AI answers. Blocking training-only crawlers like GPTBot has no effect on AI search visibility (OpenAI docs, 2025). Whether to block them is a separate choice about how your data gets used.
How long should a page be?
Long enough to answer the question, and no longer. Google says it has no preferred word count (Google, 2025), and over a billion pages with more than 1,000 words get zero traffic (Ahrefs, 2025). Match the length to the search intent and structure the page clearly.
We hand-code our sites, so the answers, question headings and schema sit in static HTML that AI crawlers can read without running JavaScript. On a call, we'll point out the pages on your site where an AI engine would struggle to find a clear, sourced answer.