GEO in Practice: How to Get Your Business Into AI Answers

GEO in practice means making sure AI assistants can find you, read your site and know who you are. For a small or mid-sized business that's six steps: let AI crawlers in, keep text in the HTML, make company details consistent, answer questions with facts, earn mentions and measure. You can check each one yourself.

If you're wondering what SEO and GEO are: GEO is optimisation for AI answers and builds on SEO rather than replacing it.

Summary

• A common blocker is technical: AI crawlers blocked in robots.txt or by a firewall.
• Key text belongs in the HTML, not behind JavaScript.
• AI Overviews and AI Mode follow normal SEO. Google-Extended affects model training, not whether you appear in them.
• Search Console and Bing now report AI visibility; ChatGPT and Perplexity need manual testing.
• Nobody can guarantee a citation.

1. Can AI crawlers reach your site?

Each AI service runs its own crawlers, and robots.txt tells them where they may go. For AI answers, the search crawlers matter, not the training ones. From the OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic and Google documentation, including Search Console Help:

Google-Extended isn't a crawler, just a robots.txt token. Block it and AI Overviews can still show you, but your content won't be used to train Gemini or Search AI feature models, or to ground answers in the Gemini app (Google).

Robots.txt won't help if a firewall stops the crawlers. OpenAI and Perplexity recommend allowing their published IP ranges, and Google says your CDN and hosting must allow crawling too (Google). Since 15 September 2026, for example, Cloudflare's defaults for new domains block training crawlers and AI agents that fetch pages for chat on pages with ads (Cloudflare), and its managed robots.txt can add blocks for GPTBot, ClaudeBot or Google-Extended above your own rules (Cloudflare).

How to check:

• Open yourdomain.sk/robots.txt and look for "Disallow: /" under "User-agent: *" or under any crawler in the table. Lines you didn't write may come from your CDN.
• In Search Console, check Settings > Search generative AI. Since 31 August 2026 you can exclude your site from AI Overviews and AI Mode there; it's included by default (Google).
• Search your host's access logs for OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot. A 403 status means something is blocking them.

2. Can AI crawlers read your site without JavaScript?

Google runs JavaScript but warns that not all bots can, and recommends server-side rendering (Google). OpenAI's and Perplexity's crawler docs don't mention JavaScript.

A December 2024 measurement by Vercel and MERJ found OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot didn't render JavaScript; Gemini, on Google's infrastructure, did (Vercel). That may have changed, but it's safer to assume it hasn't.

Risky spots: prices and reviews in third-party widgets, tab content that loads on click, and sites built as JavaScript apps. A Liptov guesthouse with prices only in its booking widget shows them to guests, not to crawlers that skip JavaScript.

How to check: Press Ctrl+U (Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) and search the source for a sentence, a price or your opening hours. If they're missing, crawlers that skip JavaScript can't see them. The fix is server-side rendering, or at least key details as plain text.

3. Does AI know who you are?

Google looks for your site name, contact details and social profiles where they're public (Google). When these details differ, a machine may not realise it's one business. A Žilina joinery that's "Novák Nábytok" on its site, "Stolárstvo Novák" on Google and "Novak nabytok" on Facebook is one business to a person and three to a machine.

• The same name, address, phone and hours on your site, Google Business Profile, social media and directories. Google says complete, accurate details make you more likely to show in local results (Google). Microsoft also recommends Bing Places for AI answers (Bing).
• Organization structured data on your home or About page (a LocalBusiness subtype for physical premises): name, legalName as registered, logo, address, phone and, under sameAs, links to your profiles. It helps Google tell you apart from other organisations (Google), though it isn't required for AI search (Google).
• llms.txt is ignored by Google. You can add one for other services, but its effect isn't proven. More in What is llms.txt.

How to check: Search Google for your business name and town and check the profile, address and hours. Run your home page through Google's Rich Results Test. Compare your name and address across your site, Google, Facebook and the business register.

4. How do you write content AI will cite?

Google says people in AI search ask longer, more specific questions and follow-ups (Google), so it recommends unique content over generic advice anyone could write (Google).

• Put the answer in the first two sentences and the detail after.
• Phrase headings as customer questions, such as "How long does a custom kitchen take?".
• Add facts only you have: lead times, the regions you cover, what drives the price, lessons from your own jobs.
• Name the author and source your figures; both feature in Google's self-assessment questions for content (Google).

Don't create a page for every variation of a question: done to manipulate AI answers, Google treats it as spam (Google).

How to check: List the five questions customers ask most. For each, find a page that answers it in two sentences and includes a fact competitors lack. Where there's none, that's your first task.

5. Do other sites mention you?

Google says its AI features can show what's said about products and services in blogs, videos and forums, but chasing inauthentic mentions helps less than it seems (Google). In local search, prominence depends partly on how many sites link to a business and how many reviews it has (Google).

Beyond that, evidence thins. In a University of Toronto preprint (data from August 2025), AI search engines cited independent sources such as reviews and media far more often than brands' own sites. For Toronto car repairers, dentists and removalists, the sources each AI cited overlapped only modestly (arXiv). It's one study, mainly of the US and Canada, and it didn't cover Slovak. OpenAI, Perplexity and Anthropic say nothing about reviews in their crawler docs.

What to do: ask happy customers for Google reviews and reply to them. Join your industry's directories and associations, and price comparison sites if you sell online. Pitch the media a genuine story. Don't buy reviews or link packages.

How to check: Search Google for your business name plus -site:yourdomain.sk to see what others say. Compare the number and recency of your reviews with your three closest competitors.

6. How do you measure visibility in AI search?

Search Console. Google says sites appearing in AI features are "included in the overall search traffic in Search Console", within the Performance report's Web search type (Google). Since 31 August 2026, a separate Generative AI performance report also shows impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country and device (Google).

Bing Webmaster Tools. The AI Performance report (public preview since February 2026) shows how often, and which of your URLs, Copilot, Bing's AI summaries and selected partners cite (Bing).

A monthly test for ChatGPT, Perplexity and the Gemini app:

• Pick 10 to 20 customer questions, such as "Which garage in Trenčín repairs hybrids?".
• Each month, enter them word for word in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Mode.
• Record whether you were mentioned, whether the details were right and which sites were cited. Those sites are your list for step 5.

Track the trend over months, not single answers: Microsoft notes citations shift with models, content freshness and user behaviour (Bing).

What this won't guarantee

• A citation. Google says meeting every requirement still doesn't guarantee indexing or serving (Google).
• The same answer for everyone. AI Overviews and AI Mode may use different models and links, and AI Overviews often don't appear at all (Google).
• A level playing field. In the study above, AI favoured big brands over smaller ones in generic questions.

Frequently asked questions

What are AI Overviews and Google AI Mode?

AI Overviews are AI summaries above Google's results, with links to sources. AI Mode is Google's AI search mode: it splits a question into subtopics, searches them at once and takes follow-ups (Google). Both work in Slovakia and in Slovak (Google, Google).

Can I do GEO without an agency?

Steps 1, 3 and 6, yes, with access to Search Console, your Business Profile and robots.txt. Step 2 usually needs a developer; content and mentions are long-term work.

Why does AI get my details wrong?

AI blends several sources, and Google says AI Mode doesn't always get it right (Google). You can't edit the answer, only its sources: your site, Business Profile and directories.

Want to know whether Google and AI assistants can see your site? Ask for a free marketing diagnostic or see our SEO and AI search service.