GEO: Optimising Your Site for ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity in 2026
To be placed at /llms.txt. Optionally /llms-full.txt, which holds a condensed version of the whole site.
9. Domain authority
LLMs weight their sources. A site cited 50 times by other reference sites will be favoured over an unknown site with equivalent content.
Building your authority:
- Guest articles in reference media
- Presence on podcasts and at conferences
- Citations in sector studies
- Natural backlinks through valuable content
10. Human E-E-A-T signals
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. LLMs look for human signals: an identified author with a bio page, team photos, press mentions, verifiable client cases, testimonials with a name and company.
A blog signed "The FreshMarkom team" is weaker than a blog signed "Sanchu Jeyarajah, co-founder, 12 years of web dev experience".
How to measure your GEO in 2026
Three metrics to track:
1. AI mentions Regularly ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini:
- "What are the best [your sector] agencies in [your city/country]?"
- "How do you [solve the problem you address]?"
- "Which tools for [use case]?"
Note whether your site is cited, in what context, at what position among the sources.
2. AI referral traffic In Google Analytics 4 or Plausible, add filters to spot:
- Referrer contains
chat.openai.com - Referrer contains
claude.ai - Referrer contains
perplexity.ai - Referrer contains
bing.com/chat
These sources often represent under 1% of traffic in 2024 but climb to 3 to 8% in 2026 on GEO-optimised content.
3. Coverage of target questions List 20 to 50 questions your ICP actually asks. For each one, check whether:
- You have dedicated content on your site
- The content answers the question directly
- It is technically well structured (schema, FAQ, etc.)
Target: 80% coverage on your top 50 questions.
FAQ
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the practice of optimising a site so it is cited as a source by conversational AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini). It complements classic SEO by adapting to the new LLM-based answer engines.
SEO targets ranking in traditional Google SERPs. GEO targets citations in the answers of conversational AI. The two share best practices (speed, structure, accessibility) but GEO leans harder on structured data, FAQs, tables and cited sources.
Three conditions: have self-contained content that answers the question directly, be well indexed by the crawlers (clean HTML, speed), and have recognised authority in your field (external citations, press mentions).
No, GEO is added to SEO. Google Search still represents a majority share of search traffic in 2026. Sites that neglect classic SEO lose volume, and those that neglect GEO lose audience quality and their visibility with decision-makers.
Between 2 and 6 months. LLMs reindex more often than Google Search (sometimes monthly), so structural changes (schemas, FAQ, llms.txt) produce faster effects than traditional SEO.
A text file placed at the root of a site that summarises its structure and points AI towards the most relevant content. Inspired by robots.txt and sitemap.xml, the llms.txt standard was proposed in late 2024 and is being adopted gradually by the main models.
For structure: Schema Markup Validator, llms.txt generators (several free ones). For tracking: Google Search Console (still useful), Plausible Analytics (AI referrer filtering), manual tests on ChatGPT/Claude/Perplexity. For the audit: ahrefs, Sitebulb for the technical side.
In summary
GEO has become a pillar of the visibility strategy in 2026. Optimised sites capture the citations in AI answers, which reach an audience in the buying phase with a quality higher than classic SEO.
The 10 pillars to put in place: self-contained content, rich schema.org, explicit FAQs, comparison tables, server-side HTML, speed, source citations, llms.txt, authority, human E-E-A-T signals.
The full setup takes 2 to 4 weeks for an existing site. The investment pays back in 4 to 8 months through the growth in AI citations and the resilience of traffic against cannibalisation by generated answers.
If you want to know where your site stands on these 10 pillars, we run dedicated GEO audits at FreshMarkom. Turnaround 5 working days, delivered with a prioritised action plan.