Someone is looking for a firm that can automate his back office. He used to type that into Google and get ten results. Now he asks ChatGPT and gets one answer, with two or three names in it.
If you are not among them, you do not exist for that person. There is no second page to be on.
What GEO is
GEO stands for generative engine optimization: being found in the answers of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, instead of only in Google's search results.
It resembles SEO and it is not SEO. SEO is about ranking among competitors. GEO is about being quoted in an answer that nobody else appears in.
Google gave you ten chances per search. An AI gives you one.
Why your current site probably does not manage it
We had our own site scanned. Grade: a C, 55 percent. Three sub-scores were good — the AI models know us, the technology is sound, and our texts answer real questions. Three were bad:
Citability, 22 percent. An AI prefers to pick out a single paragraph that holds up on its own. Our texts were a running story, in which every sentence only had meaning with the previous one alongside it. Useless to quote.
Brand footprint, 26 percent. No llms.txt that was correct, schema markup with invented links in it, and zero linked reviews.
Anti-slop, 20 percent. Generic AI phrases. "State of the art." "The perfect solution." "Extensive experience." That lowers your credibility with readers, and it turns out AI models are put off by it just as much.
That last one is the bitter part: if you let an AI write your texts without doing anything with them, an AI will quote you less often.
Six things that do work
- One version of every fact. If your target group appears on one page as "10 to 500 staff" and elsewhere as "5 to 250", a crawler does not know which is true and will not quote you.
- Clean HTML. Headings, paragraphs, lists, tables. No text that only appears via JavaScript, and an FAQ whose answers are in the source code even when collapsed.
- Blocks that can stand alone. Every answer one to three sentences that holds up without the sentence before it.
- Figures over claims. "550 hours a year" gets quoted. "Substantial time savings" does not.
- Fast loading, without heavy JavaScript. Far from every AI crawler renders a page in full.
- No AI slop. Write the way you talk.
How to measure whether it works
This is where most agencies go quiet, because measuring is harder than advising.
Set five fixed questions your customer would also ask — without your company name in them. "Who helps small and mid-sized companies in the Netherlands with AI automation." Record whether you are mentioned, and whether your site is referred to. Repeat that every month with exactly the same questions.
That is the whole method. If your name is not in there on a question you are the answer to, you know enough.
We built a tool for it because we wanted to know for ourselves, and it is called SitePulse. But the method works by hand too, with a notebook.