When patients, clients or customers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI a question ("Who is the best orthopaedic surgeon in Munich?", "Which law firm can help with employment law?"), these systems recommend specific names. Whether your business is among them is not decided on your website alone, but in the sources AI models cite: industry directories, review platforms, press coverage and machine-readable content. The good news: this can be measured, and deliberately improved. The technical term for it is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).
The five-minute self-test
- Open ChatGPT (and Perplexity, where you can see the sources) and ask five questions your customers would ask: "Best [your category] in [your city]?", "[your problem area]: who do you recommend?", "[your company name]: what do you know about it?"
- Note down: are you mentioned? Are competitors mentioned? Which sources are cited?
- Repeat the questions on a different day. AI answers fluctuate; only several runs produce a reliable picture.
Why you (probably) do not appear
- You are missing from the sources that get cited. AI answers to "best X in Y" draw heavily on directories and portals (Google Business Profile, industry directories, review platforms). If you are not listed there, you do not exist for the AI.
- Your website is unreadable to machines. Case studies locked inside images or JavaScript sliders, missing structured data, no facts in text form. We experienced this ourselves: our strongest results were not on the page as text, so AI crawlers could not see them.
- No third party is talking about you. AI models weight independent mentions (press, expert articles, reviews) more heavily than self-promotion.
What actually helps, in this order
- Directory foundation: maintain a complete Google Business Profile; register in the three to five industry directories that matter in your category; keep the data identical everywhere (name, address, phone).
- Build reviews systematically, because they are a central trust signal for AI answers.
- Make your website machine-readable: services, results and FAQs as real text; structured data (schema.org); answer one question per page, directly in the first paragraph.
- Show your expertise in public: expert articles, a podcast, explanatory content, the material AI systems quote from.
- Measure instead of guessing: check the core questions in your category regularly across several AI systems and document how the picture develops.
We are running exactly this analysis for selected companies right now, with documented AI answers as proof. Book a free initial consultation if you want to know how visible your business is in AI answers, or start with our visibility calculator.
Frequently asked questions
What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
GEO covers every measure that makes a company visible in the answers of AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google AI, the equivalent of SEO for classic Google search.
How do I find out whether my business appears in ChatGPT?
Ask the questions your customers ask ("best X in city") several times on different days in ChatGPT and Perplexity, and document who is named and which sources are cited.
Why does ChatGPT recommend my competitors and not me?
Usually because competitors appear in the sources AI systems cite: directories, review platforms, press. Anyone missing from those, or whose website holds no machine-readable facts, is rarely named.
Is AI visibility more important than classic SEO?
It complements it. Google stays relevant, but a growing share of buying decisions now begins in AI assistants, with far fewer, and far weightier, recommendations per answer.
