More buyers now ask an assistant a question instead of scanning ten blue links: “who builds affordable websites for small businesses?” or “what does a law firm website cost?” The assistant answers in a paragraph and names a few businesses. Generative engine optimization is how you give your business a fair chance of being one of them.
How AI assistants choose what to say
Assistants combine what they learned in training with live web results. When they search the web, they favour pages that are easy to crawl, answer the question directly and agree with other sources. Three things matter most:
- Clarity. A page that states “we build websites for small businesses in the US and Canada for $1,950 a year” is easier to quote than one that hides the price behind a form.
- Consistency. Your name, services, prices and location should match on your site, your Google Business Profile and your other listings.
- Corroboration. Mentions on other credible sites, reviews and a real author or team behind the content make a claim safer to repeat.
A GEO checklist for your website
- Let the crawlers in. Check that your robots.txt does not block the AI and search crawlers you want, such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
- Put the answer first. Open each page with one or two sentences that answer the main question, then add detail below.
- Write real FAQs. Use the exact questions customers ask, answer each in two to four sentences, and mark them up with FAQ structured data.
- Add structured data. Organization, Service, Offer, Article and BreadcrumbList markup spell out who you are and what you sell.
- Publish prices and facts. Pages with concrete numbers, locations and timelines are quoted more often than vague ones.
- Show who wrote it. Name the author, show a date and keep it updated.
- Add an llms.txt. A short file at /llms.txt that summarises your business and links to key pages is cheap and harmless. Treat it as an extra, not a promise.
- Build corroboration. Claim your Google Business Profile, ask happy customers for reviews and get listed where your customers actually look.
- Keep it fast and mobile-friendly. The same technical basics that help search help assistants fetch your pages reliably.
What GEO cannot do
AI answers vary by model, by the wording of the question and from week to week. Nobody can guarantee a citation or a top position, and anyone who does is selling certainty that does not exist. What you can do is remove the obstacles: make your site clear, factual and easy to read for people and for machines.
How we handle it
Every site we build ships with the technical side already done: structured data, FAQ markup, an llms.txt, clean mobile pages and on-page SEO, included in the $1,950 yearly package. If you already have a site, the AI Website Upgrade ($1,700 one time) rebuilds it to be fast, mobile-first and ready for AI search. For ongoing content and local visibility, see our SEO services.