Showing up in AI answers: a GEO checklist for product teams

More and more people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews the question they used to type into a search box: which studio, which tool, which provider. Nobody can promise that an assistant will cite you. What you can do is make your site easy to read, easy to trust and easy to quote. This is the checklist we worked through on our own site, and the one we use on the web products we build.

1. Let the crawlers in, on purpose

Open your robots.txt and decide, bot by bot:

• Search and answer bots fetch pages to answer people's questions: OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User, Perplexity's PerplexityBot, Anthropic's Claude-SearchBot and Claude-User. Block them and you can't be cited.
• Training bots collect text to train models: GPTBot, ClaudeBot. Allowing them or not is a separate decision.
• Google-Extended only controls whether Google uses your content for Gemini. It doesn't affect Google Search or AI Overviews, which use the normal Googlebot.

Check your CDN or firewall too: some block these bots by default without anyone deciding to.

2. Put the words in the HTML

Most AI crawlers read the HTML they're sent and don't run JavaScript. If your pages are drawn in the browser, they may see an empty page. Render on the server or prerender, then check: view the page source, or fetch it from the command line, and look for your actual text. Each page needs its own title, description and canonical address in that HTML too.

3. Say who you are, the same way everywhere

Assistants piece together who you are from many places. Give them one consistent story:

• The facts: your name, what you do, for whom, where and since when, written plainly on the home page and the about page.
• The same facts elsewhere: LinkedIn, Clutch, Google Business Profile and directories should say the same thing. Old descriptions and old service names confuse the picture.
• Structured data: Organization markup with your address, contact details and links to those profiles (sameAs).

4. One page per question, and the answer at the top

• One page per intent. "Kiosk design", "EAA compliance" and "loyalty programme" are separate questions; give each its own page.
• Answer first. The first paragraph says what the page is about in a sentence someone could quote.
• Question-shaped headings where they fit, and FAQs that are visible on the page, not only in the markup.
• Specific beats general. "11:1 to 14:1 contrast, measured on the screens" is quotable; "high contrast" isn't.

5. Show your evidence

Assistants lean on pages they can cite. Give them something to cite:

• case studies with real numbers, and client names where you're allowed to use them;
• a date on every article, and a visible update when it changes;
• sources linked for every rule or figure you didn't produce yourself;
• your own data where you have it. Original research is the content nobody else can copy.

6. Treat each language as its own market

If you work in more than one language, translate properly and connect the pages with hreflang. People search differently in each language: Turkish buyers type "UX ajansı" or "mobil uygulama geliştirme şirketi", not a translation of the English phrase. Write for the words they use.

7. Get indexed quickly

• An XML sitemap with honest lastmod dates.
• Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing's index feeds Microsoft Copilot, and other assistants also draw on search partners.
• IndexNow, so Bing and others hear about a new or changed page right away.

8. Add llms.txt, without expecting miracles

llms.txt is a proposed file that gives AI tools a short map of your site: who you are and which pages matter. It takes an hour to write. No major assistant has said it uses it, so treat it as a cheap extra, not a strategy.

9. Earn mentions elsewhere

What others say about you weighs more than what you say about yourself: client reviews, directory listings, partner pages, interviews, talks, research others cite. This part can't be done in code, and it's often the biggest gap.

10. Measure what you can

• Referrals: in GA4, look for chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com. ChatGPT also tags its links with utm_source=chatgpt.com.
• Google: clicks from AI Overviews are counted in Search Console with ordinary web search, so they can't be separated.
• Ask the assistants. Once a month, ask them the questions your buyers ask and note whether you're mentioned, and how.
• Ask your leads how they found you. It's still the most reliable source.

What we'd avoid

• Pages written for bots: keyword lists, hidden text, near-identical pages for every city. Search engines and assistants discount them.
• Promising positions. Nobody controls what an assistant answers.
• Blocking every AI bot by default without deciding what you lose.

Where we come in

• Web & SaaS: we design and build web products that are findable from the first release: rendered on the server, structured, multilingual, and fast.
• UX/UI and content design: pages that answer the question people actually ask.

If your site doesn't show up where your buyers now ask their questions, we're happy to look at it with you.