Your customers now ask a second kind of search engine. Instead of ten blue links, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews answer "who is a good accountant near me?" with three or four businesses by name. Being one of the names is the new page one. Here is what actually decides it, starting with what Google itself says.
First, what Google actually says
Google's own documentation on AI features in Search is unusually direct. There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations are necessary. You do not need to create new machine-readable files, "AI text files" or markup. A page is eligible to be cited when it is indexed and eligible to appear in Search with a snippet, and Google recommends the same things it has always recommended: helpful, reliable, people-first content, with the important content available as text.
Two consequences follow. Anyone selling you an "AI optimization file" is selling smoke. And the work that gets a business cited is the SEO foundation done thoroughly, plus one thing most websites skip: being quotable.
How assistants decide who to name
Strip away the mystery and the process is mundane. An assistant retrieves pages its search index or search partner already knows, reads them, extracts facts it can attribute, and prefers sources it can verify. It leans towards statements that are explicit and unambiguous, towards business details that agree with each other across the web, and towards pages that answer the question directly rather than around it.
A website that describes itself in slogans, hides its prices and services in images, and lists a different phone number on Facebook is invisible to that process. It might look wonderful. It cannot be quoted.
The checklist we ship on every site
This is the SEO and GEO checklist included in every package, translated into what it does for AI citations.
- Indexable and fast. If Google cannot index the page, no AI feature can cite it. Clean HTML, a sitemap, correct canonical tags, no leftover
noindex, and speed that passes Core Web Vitals. - Entity clarity. Your business name, address, phone, opening hours and service area stated in text on the site, identical to your Google Business Profile and social profiles, and described in Organization or LocalBusiness structured data so machines know exactly who you are.
- One plain sentence that says what you do, near the top of the home page. "Woodside Plumbing is a licensed plumbing contractor serving Woodside and the surrounding area, available 24 hours for emergencies." Assistants lift sentences like that verbatim.
- Quotable facts. Prices or price ranges, service areas named town by town, response times, years in business, what is included. Concrete numbers are what an answer is made of.
- Questions and answers. An FAQ section written from real customer questions, marked up as FAQPage structured data. The question your customer asks the assistant is often word for word one you could answer on your site.
- Structured data for what you sell. Services, products and offers described in the schema.org vocabulary, with prices where they are public.
- Consistent profiles. The same facts on Google Business Profile, Facebook, LinkedIn, directories and your site. Disagreement is doubt, and doubt is a reason not to cite.
- Text, not pictures of text. Menus as PDFs, prices baked into images and services listed only in a video are invisible to both search engines and assistants.
How to check whether it is working
Ask the assistants the question your customer asks, phrased the way a customer phrases it: "who does emergency plumbing in Woodside?", "best dentist near Han Asparuh". Note which businesses are named and which pages are cited. Do it monthly.
In Search Console, traffic from Google's AI features is reported inside the normal web search performance data, so the report you already watch includes it. If AI-related impressions grow while your ranking positions hold, the quotability work is paying off.
What not to bother with
- Special AI files or markup sold as a service. Google says they are not required.
- Keyword stuffing aimed at models. Assistants summarize; they do not count repetitions.
- Content hidden from humans to feed machines. The same content should serve both.
- Buying "AI citations". Nobody sells a placement in an answer, whatever the invoice says.
Honest expectations
Nobody can guarantee a citation, in the same way nobody can guarantee a ranking: Google and the AI companies decide their own results and keep changing them. What can be guaranteed is the foundation: an indexable, fast, correctly structured site whose facts are explicit, consistent and quotable. Without it, being named is impossible. With it, it becomes likely, and everything you invest afterwards works harder.
Every website we build ships with that foundation, from the $490 landing page to the ready-made sites and the online stores. If your current site cannot be quoted, send us the address and we will tell you what is missing.
Questions people ask
Frequently asked
Does a small local business really need this?
Increasingly, yes. People now ask assistants things like 'best pizza place near me' or 'who can build me a website in Sofia', and the assistant answers with a few businesses by name. If your business facts are not machine-readable, the assistant cannot name you, and it names a competitor instead.
Is GEO different from SEO?
They overlap almost entirely at the foundation: an indexable, fast, well-structured site with clear content helps both. GEO adds emphasis on quotability: explicit factual statements, consistent business details, structured data and question-and-answer content that an assistant can lift and attribute with confidence.
Do I need an llms.txt file or special AI markup?
Google says no: there are no additional requirements or special optimizations to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no new machine-readable files are needed. Such files are harmless and some platforms generate them, but nothing on this page depends on one. The work is the fundamentals, done thoroughly.
How long until an assistant mentions my business?
Assistants that search the live web can reflect a page within days of it being indexed; Google's AI features draw on the same index as Search, so they follow indexing and ranking. Nobody can promise a date or a placement. What can be promised is that the facts are there to be found.
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