The benefits of GEO: get AIs to send you business!

When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Google's AI Mode to recommend a plumber, an accountant or a web designer, the answer names a handful of businesses. GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimization, is the work that makes your business one of them: it makes you easy for AI assistants to find, to understand and to quote with confidence. It is quickly becoming more important than classic SEO, and the clearest evidence we have comes from our own servers.

What our servers see: AI crawlers read as much as search engines

MaiaHost, the hosting company run by our parent company, measures every request to the websites it hosts and sorts the traffic into people, search engines, AI crawlers, attacks and disguised bots. These are the numbers for 8 to 22 September 2026, across 483 websites and subdomains belonging to 341 hosting accounts.

• AI crawlers made 644,495 page requests. That is 19% of all the page requests that were not attacks or disguised bots, roughly one in five, and 13% of all page requests, attacks included.
• That is about as many pages as Google, Bing and every other search engine crawler fetched combined: 617,927 in the same fifteen days.
• They visited 404 of the 483 sites, 84% of them.

On one of our servers, which hosts about 160 websites, we went further and checked each crawler's network address against the ranges its operator publishes, so that impostors borrowing a famous name could not inflate the count. These are the pages each verified crawler read in the same fifteen days:

Anthropic's crawler read almost three times as many pages as Googlebot, and OpenAI's almost twice as many. Our own blog shows how fast that happens. We published its first seven articles at lunchtime on 2 September. OpenAI's crawler read all seven 64 hours later, in fifteen seconds. Anthropic's read them after ten days. Googlebot first reached the blog after eleven and a half days.

How we counted: requests are sorted by the name each crawler declares. For the table and the blog timings we kept only successful requests for real pages (no images, scripts or attack probes) and checked the source addresses. 99% of GPTBot's requests came from the address ranges OpenAI publishes, and ClaudeBot's, Meta's and Googlebot's from their operators' own networks. The fleet-wide figures come from MaiaHost's traffic statistics, which classify every request the same way.

A caution before anyone quotes these numbers: they describe the 483 websites we host, not the whole internet. Cloudflare, which sees a far larger slice of the web, reported for 2025 that AI bots other than Googlebot made 4.2% of the page requests it handled and Googlebot alone 4.5%. The direction is the same everywhere. The machines that write answers now read the web about as much as the machines that rank it.

What GEO is, and where the name comes from

The term comes from a research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, written by academics at Princeton, IIT Delhi and other institutions and published at the KDD 2024 conference. They treated AI answer engines the way SEO treats search engines. They changed web pages in controlled ways and measured how much of the AI's answer each page won. The headline finding, in the authors' words: "GEO can boost visibility by up to 40% in generative engine responses."

What worked matters more than the number. The three strongest techniques were citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics, each lifting visibility by roughly 30 to 40% on the paper's word-count measure. Keyword stuffing, the oldest SEO trick there is, did little or nothing. And the sites that gained most were the ones ranked lower to begin with: citing sources raised the visibility of the fifth-ranked site by 115% on average, while the top-ranked site lost ground.

In practice, GEO means making every important fact about your business explicit, consistent and verifiable. That covers who you are, what you do, where, for whom, at what price and how quickly. Then it has to be in a form an assistant can lift into an answer and attribute to you.

SEO and GEO: what changes

The two share a foundation. Google's documentation on AI features in Search says there are no additional requirements or special optimizations for AI Overviews and AI Mode: a page must be indexed and eligible to appear with a snippet, and the usual SEO best practices apply. A site that search engines cannot index cannot be quoted by the assistants that draw on them either. GEO is SEO's next layer, and it is the layer where the growth is.

Why GEO now matters more than classic SEO

The audience has moved. OpenAI said in August 2026 that ChatGPT reaches more than a billion people every week. Google reported in May 2026 that AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode more than a billion, and in August that the Gemini app passed a billion monthly users too. Asking an assistant is no longer an early-adopter habit.

The click is shrinking. When the Pew Research Center tracked real browsing in 2025, people clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits to a results page with an AI summary, against 15% without one, and clicked a link inside the summary only 1% of the time. Ahrefs measured a 58% lower click-through rate for the number-one result when an AI Overview appears. Similarweb now puts the share of Google searches that end without any click at 68%.

Being cited is the new number one. Seer Interactive studied 53 brands across 5.47 million queries. Brands cited inside an AI Overview got 120% more organic clicks per impression than brands that were not cited. The click has not disappeared. It goes to the business the answer names.

The machines are already reading your site. Our numbers above show AI crawlers fetching about as many pages as all the search engines combined. They are building what assistants will say about you whether you have prepared for them or not.

Put together: ranking still matters, because it is how you get into the pool of sources an assistant draws from. But a ranking that is never quoted is worth less every month, and a quotation is worth more. That is the sense in which GEO is overtaking SEO. It has not replaced it. It has become the part that decides who gets the customer.

The benefits of GEO for a small business

1. You are recommended, not just listed. An assistant does not show your listing; it presents your business as an answer, often with the reason it chose you. That carries weight no position on a results page does.
2. Customers who arrive ready to buy. People describe their whole problem to an assistant: a boiler engineer in Leeds who can come tomorrow and takes card payments. When your pages answer that precise question, the enquiry that follows is from someone who has already been told you fit.
3. Small businesses can win. Assistants reward clear, specific, verifiable facts, not advertising budgets. In the GEO study the lower-ranked sites gained the most, and nobody can state your prices, service area and opening hours better than you.
4. One set of facts feeds every assistant. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews all read the same public web. Get your facts right once, on your own site, and every assistant can use them.
5. It makes your SEO work harder. Structured data, question-and-answer content and explicit facts also earn rich results and better rankings in classic search. GEO work is never wasted on Google.
6. The room is small, so early matters. An answer has space for three or four names. The businesses that make themselves quotable while competitors still optimize only for the list of links are the ones assistants learn to name first.

Do not block the AIs you want recommendations from

AI companies run several kinds of crawler, and treating them all alike is a common mistake. Training crawlers such as OpenAI's GPTBot and Anthropic's ClaudeBot collect pages that may be used to train future models. Google-Extended is not a crawler at all, but a robots.txt setting that controls whether Google may use your content for Gemini, without affecting Google Search. Search crawlers such as OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot build the indexes assistants search when they answer. User fetchers such as ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User visit a page at the moment a person asks about it.

Blocking the training crawlers is a legitimate choice. Blocking the search crawlers is a decision not to be recommended: OpenAI states that sites which block OAI-SearchBot do not appear in ChatGPT's search answers, and Anthropic warns that blocking Claude-SearchBot or Claude-User may reduce your visibility in Claude. Check your robots.txt, and any firewall or bot-protection setting your host or CDN applies, before assuming the assistants can see you. Ours lets them all in.

How to tell whether it is working

• Ask the assistants. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity the question your customer asks, phrased the way a customer would phrase it, and note who is named and which pages are cited.
• Search Console. Google counts clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode in the normal Performance report, under the Web search type.
• Your analytics. Visits referred by chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, gemini.google.com, claude.ai or copilot.microsoft.com are people an assistant sent to you. Some assistants pass no referrer, so the true number is higher than the one you see.
• Your hosting statistics. If your website is hosted at MaiaHost, the Traffic tab in your hosting portal shows AI crawlers separately from people and search engines. The fleet-wide numbers at the top of this article come from the same statistics.

What GEO work actually involves

The practical side is in our checklist for getting cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. In short:

• One plain sentence near the top of your home page that says what you do, where, and for whom.
• Your name, address, phone number and opening hours identical on your site, your Google Business Profile and every directory.
• Structured data (JSON-LD) describing your business, services, prices and FAQs in the vocabulary machines read.
• Real questions from real customers, answered on your site in plain words.
• Concrete, citable facts: prices or price ranges, service areas, response times, years in business, and sources for any claim you make.
• Everything as text, not locked inside images, PDFs or videos.

Honest expectations

Nobody can guarantee that an assistant will name your business, just as nobody can guarantee a ranking: the AI companies decide their own answers and change them constantly. Be wary of anyone selling a guaranteed placement in ChatGPT. What can be guaranteed is a website whose facts are explicit, consistent, structured and open to the crawlers that matter. Without that, being recommended is close to impossible. With it, every assistant that reads your site has what it needs to send you the customer.

Every website we build ships with that foundation, from the $490 landing page to the ready-made websites from $500 and the custom online stores; the full list is on our SEO and GEO page. If you want to know what the assistants currently say about your business, and what they are missing, send us your website address and we will tell you.