ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews now answer questions directly. Here's what Generative Engine Optimisation and AI Optimisation actually mean, and why blocking the wrong bot in robots.txt can shut you out entirely.
Search used to mean a list of blue links. Now a growing share of questions get answered directly — by Google's AI Overviews, or by asking ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot instead of opening a browser tab at all. If an AI system can't read your site, it can't mention your business in that answer.
SEO gets you found in traditional search results. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is about being cited inside an AI-generated answer. AIO (AI Optimisation) is the broader practice of making your whole site legible to AI systems, not just search engines. They overlap heavily with technical SEO — a fast, well-structured, schema-rich site is most of the work for both.
Many sites unknowingly block AI crawlers — GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended — in robots.txt, often from a security plugin or an old "block all bots" rule. If that's in place, ChatGPT and Claude cannot read your site at all, no matter how good the content is. This is usually the first thing worth checking.
An emerging convention — a plain-text file at /llms.txt summarising what your site is and what's on it, written for AI systems rather than humans. Not yet universally adopted, but low-cost to add and exactly the kind of signal early-mover sites benefit from.
Structured data (Organization, LocalBusiness, FAQ, review schema), clear factual content AI can quote directly, an entity that's unambiguous across your site and social profiles, and — the basic one — not accidentally blocking the bots in the first place.
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Some publishers block them to protect content from being used to train models without compensation — a legitimate business decision. For most local/service businesses wanting to be found and recommended, though, blocking works directly against that goal.
Google-Extended is a separate, named crawler specifically for Google's AI features — a site can allow regular Googlebot (for search) while blocking Google-Extended (for AI training/features), which is worth checking explicitly.
AI-generated answers are already a meaningful share of how people search, and the direction of travel points toward more, not less — treating it as a fad risks being unprepared when it matters more.
Yes — AI systems cite whatever they can find and trust, and a well-structured local business site has just as much chance as a national brand for genuinely local queries.
Visit yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt directly and read it, or run our free audit, which checks every major AI crawler automatically and tells you exactly which ones (if any) are shut out.
Not in the same way — they lean more heavily on content clarity, structured data and apparent authority within the answer itself, rather than a link graph, though the two overlap since good sites tend to have both.
It mostly isn't different at the technical level — a fast, well-structured, schema-rich site serves both. The distinct additions are AI-crawler access and llms.txt, which don't affect traditional Google rankings at all.
Yes — it's a plain text file, no special software needed. A clear summary of your business, what you offer and links to your key pages is enough to start; there's no strict format enforced yet since the standard is still emerging.
Yes, often — usually from outdated or inconsistent information found elsewhere online. Structured data and a clear, unambiguous entity across your own site and profiles is the best defence against being misrepresented.