GEO Optimization: How to Get Your Brand Recommended in ChatGPT & AI Search

GEO optimization (generative engine optimization) means positioning your content, your brand, and the sources about your brand so that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot mention you in their answers, recommend you, and link to you as a source.

The term comes from a research paper by Princeton University and partners, published in 2023 and presented at KDD 2024. In practice, several names are used for the same goal: AEO (answer engine optimization), LLMO (large language model optimization, common in Switzerland), or simply AI SEO.

The difference from classic SEO: it is no longer just about a spot in a list of links, but about being part of the generated answer. If you are missing there, many users will not see you at all.

Search is shifting into the answer. The numbers from Germany, Switzerland, and the US all point in the same direction:

• 50% of Germans use an AI chat at least occasionally instead of classic internet search (Bitkom, November 2025).
• When Google shows an AI summary, users click a traditional search result in only 8% of visits – compared with 15% without a summary. They click the sources within the summary itself in just 1% of visits (Pew Research Center, July 2025).
• According to Ahrefs, the presence of an AI Overview is associated with a 58% lower click-through rate (Ahrefs, February 2026).
• Seer Interactive measures an organic click-through rate that has dropped by almost two thirds for queries with AI Overviews (Seer Interactive, November 2025).
• In Switzerland, 58% of SMEs have never checked what information AI gives about their company (KMU Digital Pulse 2026, localsearch/HSLU).

For brands, this means visibility increasingly happens in the answer itself – even without a click. If you measure and optimize today, you secure your position before the source landscape in your own category solidifies.

GEO does not replace SEO; it builds on it. Most AI assistants with web search pull their information from search indexes, so if you are not indexed and findable, you will not be cited either. What differs is the goal, the result, and the measurement:

In short: SEO determines whether your pages are found. GEO determines whether the answer includes your brand – and whether it represents you correctly.

An AI assistant draws on two sources of knowledge: what the language model learned during training and, when web search is active, pages it retrieves in real time (retrieval). To produce an answer, it often breaks the question into several sub-searches (query fan-out), reads the sources it finds, and summarizes them.

Whether your brand ends up in the answer therefore depends mainly on these factors:

• Third-party sources: Comparison articles, reviews, rating portals, industry directories, Wikipedia, and forums such as Reddit shape which providers are considered relevant.
• Clear, citable statements: Pages that answer a question directly – with facts, numbers, tables, and unambiguous wording – are more likely to be picked up.
• Consistent entities: Name, offering, prices, and location should be described identically everywhere – on your website, in structured data, and in external profiles.
• Freshness: For time-related questions ("2026," "current," "best"), search systems prefer fresh, dated content.

Important: AI answers are not deterministic. The same question produces a slightly different answer on every run – and even small rewordings change which brands are mentioned.

In practice, these measures have the greatest leverage. They build on one another – start with measurement and source analysis, not with producing text.

• 1. Prompt research instead of a keyword list: Collect the questions your customers actually ask AI assistants – including comparison and purchase-decision questions ("Which tool is best for …?").
• 2. Source analysis: Find out which pages the assistants cite in your category. These are your most important levers – often not your own website, but comparison portals, trade media, and directories.
• 3. Answer-ready content: Start pages with a direct one-sentence answer, supplemented by facts, comparison tables, and FAQs. Name your brand and your offering explicitly.
• 4. Structured data & entities: Add Schema.org markup (Organization, Product, FAQPage, Article) and keep company facts identical across all profiles.
• 5. Presence in third-party sources: Make sure you appear in the comparison articles, rating portals, and trade publications that the assistants cite – through PR, guest posts, customer reviews, and partnerships.
• 6. Technical accessibility: Allow AI crawlers such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, and Google-Extended in your robots.txt, deliver content server-side, and keep load times short.
• 7. Freshness: Date your most important pages, update figures and prices regularly, and visibly mark revisions.
• 8. Multilingual content: AI assistants answer in the language of the question. For DACH, France, and international markets, you need dedicated content in German, French, and English – not just translated navigation.

GEO can be measured – but not like a classic ranking. Because answers vary with every run, a single query is worthless. What matters is only how often your brand appears across many prompts and repeated runs.

These metrics belong in every GEO report:

• Visibility (mention rate): The share of answers in which your brand is mentioned.
• Share of voice: Your share of all brand mentions compared with your competitors.
• Citation rate: How often your own pages are linked as a source.
• Position and context: Whether you are mentioned as the first recommendation or in passing – and with what tone (sentiment).
• Coverage per assistant: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Copilot behave differently – measure them separately.
• AI referral traffic: Visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, and others in your web analytics – incomplete, but directly observable.

Aurora is a GEO platform from Switzerland that collects exactly these metrics automatically. Here is how it works:

• Define prompts: You define your target audience's questions – Prompt Intelligence shows which prompts your customers actually ask AI assistants.
• Measure daily: Aurora automatically submits the prompts to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Gemini, and Copilot and analyzes the answers (Brand Visibility).
• Understand sources: The source analysis shows which pages the assistants cite – and suggests concrete actions, such as a guest post or inclusion in a comparison article.
• Prove progress: Visibility, share of voice, and citations over time – exportable as CSV/Excel or directly into Looker Studio.

The free GEO check is the fastest way to get started: in about ten seconds and without an account, it shows whether AI assistants recommend your brand. If you want to compare different tools, you will find our overview at The best GEO tools compared.

These are the mistakes we see most often in projects:

• One-off checks: A single query in ChatGPT tells you nothing – answers fluctuate from run to run.
• Only one assistant: If you only check ChatGPT, you miss Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, which are directly visible in Google searches.
• Measuring only traffic: Clicks from AI answers are rare; visibility in the answer is the real currency.
• Keyword thinking: Prompts are longer, more specific, and more comparative than search terms – optimize for questions, not for keywords.
• Ignoring third-party sources: Your own website alone is rarely enough. What matters is what others write about you.
• English only: If you sell in the DACH region or in France, you need to be visible in your customers' language.

A pragmatic start in three phases:

• Days 1–30 – Measure: Define 30 to 100 relevant prompts, establish baseline values for visibility and share of voice across all assistants, and identify the most-cited sources in your category.
• Days 31–60 – Foundations: Make core pages answer-ready (direct answer, facts, FAQ), add structured data, allow AI crawlers, and align company facts across all profiles.
• Days 61–90 – Win sources: Initiate inclusion in the most important comparison articles and directories, collect reviews, place trade articles – and measure the impact on visibility and citations.

After that, GEO becomes an ongoing process: measure monthly, close gaps, and keep content up to date.