To get your company cited in AI search answers, make sure the search crawlers of ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google can reach and index your pages, then answer each question a buyer asks in a short passage that makes sense when quoted alone. AI engines cite pages they can retrieve and passages they can lift cleanly. Everything else is ordinary good content.

Picture a logistics software company. A prospect asks ChatGPT "what is the best way to track pallets across three warehouses?" and gets a confident answer citing two competitors and a trade magazine. The company has a page on exactly this topic. It is not cited because the answer is buried in the fourth paragraph of a product tour, under a heading that says "Built for scale".

That gap, between having the answer and being the source an AI quotes, is what generative engine optimization closes.

What is generative engine optimization?

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your content easy for AI answer engines to find, understand and cite. It sits alongside search engine optimization (SEO), which targets ranked links, and answer engine optimization (AEO), which targets direct answers.

The three overlap more than the acronyms suggest. Google says it plainly in its AI features documentation: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." The same SEO basics apply. What changes is the unit that gets used. A classic search result sends people to a page. An AI answer quotes a passage from it.

How does an AI answer pick which sources to cite?

An AI answer engine breaks the question into smaller searches, retrieves pages from a search index, pulls out the passages that answer each part, and links to the pages those passages came from. Your company has the most control over one step: the passage.

Step 1: The question is split into sub-questions

Google calls this query fan-out. In its AI Mode announcement, Google's Head of Search Elizabeth Reid wrote that AI Mode works by "breaking down your question into subtopics" and "issuing a multitude of queries simultaneously on your behalf." Google's AI features documentation says both AI Overviews and AI Mode may use the technique, "issuing multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources."

For a buyer's question, the sub-questions are the follow-ups a person would ask next: cost, setup time, integrations, alternatives, risks.

Step 2: Pages are retrieved from a search index

Each engine retrieves from its own index, filled by its own crawler. Google states that to appear as a supporting link, "a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet." OpenAI's crawler documentation says OAI-SearchBot is "used to surface websites in search results in ChatGPT's search features." Perplexity's bot documentation says PerplexityBot is "designed to surface and link websites in search results on Perplexity."

Step 3: A passage is extracted

The engine needs a piece of text that answers the sub-question. Google ties AI features to snippet eligibility, and its preview controls (nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet) limit what can be shown from a page. Google also advises "making sure that important content is available in textual form." An answer that only exists inside an image, a PDF download or a script-rendered widget is harder to lift.

Step 4: The source is cited

The engine composes its answer and links to the pages it drew on. Google describes AI Overviews as "a jumping off point to explore links to learn more." In our reading, the page that gets the link is the one whose passage answered a sub-question most directly.

You can't control how a question is split or which other pages compete. You can control whether your page is retrievable in step 2 and whether it holds a clean, quotable answer in step 3.

Which AI crawlers need access to your site?

Allow the search crawlers of each AI engine you want to be cited by, and decide separately about the crawlers that collect training data. They are different bots with different jobs, and blocking one does not block the other.

• Googlebot (Google): crawls for Google Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode. If you block it, pages can't appear in Search or its AI features.

• OAI-SearchBot (OpenAI): surfaces websites in ChatGPT search. If you block it, OpenAI says the site "will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers", though it may still appear as a navigational link.

• GPTBot (OpenAI): collects content to train OpenAI's foundation models. If you block it, content is excluded from training; ChatGPT search is unaffected.

• PerplexityBot (Perplexity): surfaces and links websites in Perplexity results. Perplexity says to allow it "to ensure your site appears in search results".

• ChatGPT-User and Perplexity-User (OpenAI, Perplexity): fetch a page when a user asks for it; they are not automatic crawlers. Both vendors say robots.txt may not apply to these user-initiated fetches.

Two practical notes. OpenAI says robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to reach its systems, and Perplexity says up to a day. Both vendors also publish IP ranges for their bots, so check that your firewall or CDN isn't blocking them even when robots.txt allows them.

How do you write passages that AI engines can quote?

Write each section so its first one or two sentences answer the heading's question completely, without relying on anything above or below. That is the passage most likely to be extracted in step 3.

The passage checklist

• Headings are real questions. Phrase H2s the way a buyer would type them, and cover the follow-ups the fan-out step is likely to search for.

• The answer comes first. The first sentence under each heading answers it. Context and nuance follow.

• Passages stand alone. Avoid "as mentioned above" or "this" pointing back to an earlier paragraph. Repeat the subject by name.

• Terms are defined in one sentence. Write "X is ..." the first time a term appears, so the definition can be quoted.

• Names are full and consistent. Use the same product, company and standard names every time, and link the first mention to the official source.

• Facts are specific and sourced. Dates, prices and limits with a link to where they come from are easier to trust than general claims.

• Lists and tables carry comparisons. A table of options, a numbered process or a checklist separates items cleanly.

• The text is text. Key answers live in HTML, not in images, slides or gated downloads.

Google's own guidance for its AI experiences points the same way. In its May 2025 post for site owners, Google asks for "unique, non-commodity content" and notes that in AI search, "users are asking longer and more specific questions — as well as follow-up questions to dig even deeper."

Do you need special markup or an llms.txt file?

For Google, no. The AI features documentation says: "You don't need to create new machine readable files, AI text files, or markup to appear in these features," and "there's also no special schema.org structured data that you need to add."

Structured data still has a role. In its May 2025 post, Google calls it "useful for sharing information about your content in a machine-readable way", and it makes pages eligible for rich results in classic Search. The rule that matters is consistency: Google asks that structured data match the visible text on the page. An llms.txt file can be a tidy summary for tools that read it, but none of the three vendors' crawler pages we checked asks for one, so treat it as optional.

How do you measure whether AI search cites you?

Measure citations directly by asking the engines your buyers' questions, and measure traffic through the reports you already have. No single dashboard covers all three engines.

Track a fixed question set

Write down 20 to 30 questions your buyers ask, from broad ("how do I choose a ...") to specific ("does X integrate with Y"). Run them in ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Google AI Mode on a fixed schedule. Record which pages are cited, whether yours is one of them, and whether what the answer says about your company is correct.

Read the traffic you already get

Google says traffic from AI features is reported in Search Console's Performance report, within the "Web" search type, so it is counted with your other Google Search clicks. Referral traffic from ChatGPT and Perplexity shows up in your web analytics under their domains.

Judge quality as well as volume

Google reports that clicks from results pages with AI Overviews "are higher quality", with visitors more likely to spend time on the site. Its May 2025 post suggests looking at conversions such as "sales, signups, a more engaged audience". Count what those visits do, not only how many there are.

How we approach it at Vizio AI

We start with the questions, not the pages. Together with the client, we list what buyers ask before they buy, and the sub-questions an AI engine is likely to fan out to. Then we map each question to the page that should answer it, and note where no page does.

Next we check access: robots.txt, firewall and CDN rules for each search crawler, indexing status, and whether key answers exist as HTML text. Only then do we rewrite, section by section, so every heading is a question and every first sentence is a quotable answer. We set up the question set and the reporting at the same time, so the team can see each month which questions cite them and which still cite someone else.

This is part of the growth systems work in our Growth Studio, and it sits next to the rest of our marketing solutions. If you are choosing tools for the rest of the funnel, Which AI marketing automation tools deliver the best ROI for e-commerce? compares the options. For a look at generative AI in marketing decisions, see How F&B CMOs Use Generative AI in Business for Location Decisions.

Sources

• Google Search Central, AI features and your website: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features

• Google Search Central Blog, Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiences on Search (21 May 2025): https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/05/succeeding-in-ai-search

• Google, AI in Search: Going beyond information to intelligence (20 May 2025): https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-update/

• OpenAI API Docs, OpenAI crawlers (bots): https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots

• Perplexity Docs, Perplexity crawlers (bots): https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots