AI visibility, also known as GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), describes how well ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity find your website, understand it, and cite it as a source in their answers. For years, you optimised to rank high in Google's results list. Now there is a second stage: the generated AI answer, in which your website gets cited or doesn't.
In this article we explain how AI engines choose their sources, how GEO differs from classic SEO, which signals you can influence and what you can realistically expect.
How do ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity choose sources?
Picture a librarian answering a reader's question: instead of flipping through shelves, she reads several books, summarises them, and then cites only the three that best support her answer. That is how an AI engine works.
These systems crawl the web, index the content, and pull the relevant passages from their data when a question comes in. Whether your website appears depends on whether the engine can reach your content, make sense of it, and judge it useful. A page with a clear, compact answer to a specific question has a far easier time than one full of padding.
How is GEO different from classic SEO?
Both disciplines rest on the same foundation: good content and a technically sound website. The difference is the goal:
| Classic SEO | GEO (AI visibility) | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Clicks from the results list | A citation in the generated AI answer |
| Reader | A person browsing search results | A person reading a finished AI answer |
| Focus | Keywords, links, page quality | Crawler access, structure, direct answers, mentions |
Put simply: SEO gets you into the list a person clicks through. GEO gets you into the sentence the AI writes.
Which signals can you influence?
Four levers are realistic:
- Crawler access: Many websites block AI crawlers, sometimes deliberately (for data-protection or copyright reasons), sometimes by accident. If an engine is not allowed to read your content, it cannot recommend it either.
- Structured data: Schema.org markup such as FAQ or article helps machines grasp the meaning of a page.
- Clear answers: One sentence that answers the question directly, no filler. That is the text an AI can carry over.
- Mentions: When reputable sites, directories or industry portals write about you, your website reads as more trustworthy.
Checklist: is my website AI-readable?
- AI crawlers can visit my website (robots.txt checked)
- Key pages carry structured data (e.g. FAQ, article)
- Every key page answers one question directly in two to three sentences
- I am mentioned and linked on other reputable sites
- I watch which sources AI engines cite for my core questions
Conclusion: GEO is SEO plus a new stage
AI visibility is not a magic trick of its own: it grows out of the same work that makes good SEO, with one additional goal: being readable by machines that summarise rather than list. Keep both in view, and you are ready for both stages.
If you would like to know how visible your website is to AI engines today, talk to us: we will check crawler access, structure and the answers to your core questions. And to see what the new stage looks like in practice, read AI visibility with ChatGPT.
