GEO: how to get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode

More and more people ask an AI instead of searching on Google. What GEO is, what really matters to get cited in AI answers, and what is just noise.

For twenty years the question was: how do I rank first on Google? Now there's a second one. When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Mode "who should I hire to redo my website in Bologna?", does your name come up in the answer or not?

That's the field of GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation: making a business easy to understand and easy to cite for engines that answer with text instead of a list of links. In Italy it's no longer a topic for specialists: Google announced the arrival of AI Overviews on 25 March 2025, and AI Mode in Italian on 8 October 2025.

First, the news nobody sells: there's no trick

Google puts it in black and white in its documentation for site owners: to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations. A page must be indexed and eligible to appear in Google Search with a snippet. That's all.

So anyone selling "GEO packages" built on magic formulas is selling thin air. Serious GEO is SEO done well, plus extra work on clarity: generative engines cite whoever is understood straight away.

What really matters

A clear entity. Your company name must be written the same way everywhere: website, social profiles, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, directories. If you're "Studio Rossi" in one place, "Rossi Design" in another and "RossiLab" in a third, to a machine those are three different companies, and none of them is solid enough to be cited.
Sentences that can be quoted. Creative taglines work for people, not for engines. You need at least one plain, factual sentence: who you are, where you are, what you do, for whom. For example: "Communication, design and AI systems studio in Bologna for SMEs." Put it on your home page, in your FAQs and in your profile descriptions.
Answers to real questions. People ask AI precise things: how much it costs, how long it takes, what the difference is between A and B. An honest FAQ page and articles that answer one question at a time are the material engines pick up.
Content in text. Anything that only exists inside an image, a video or a scanned PDF barely exists for an engine. Important information belongs in the text of the page.
Consistent structured data. Schema.org helps you say who you are and what you offer, but Google's guidance is clear: it must match the text people can see on the page. Structured data that promises things nobody can see is a risk, not an advantage.
External sources that confirm. An engine trusts a company more when it finds it described consistently in several places: Google Business Profile, company LinkedIn page, industry directories, articles on other sites. The number of links isn't what counts. What counts is that they all tell the same story.
Freshness. A blog that hasn't moved in two years tells engines, and people, that the company has stood still. One new, useful piece a week is worth more than ten pages written once and forgotten.

What's noise

Stuffing copy with keywords. It makes the text worse to read and helps no modern engine. Google lists keyword stuffing in its spam policies.
Copy-and-paste pages for every city. "Web design Bologna", "Web design Modena", "Web design Ferrara", all with the same text. Google's spam policies name pages targeted at specific cities among the examples of doorway abuse.
The llms.txt file as the answer. It's an introduction file meant for language models. It costs little and does no harm, but so far there's no solid evidence that the big engines use it to decide whom to cite. Add it, but don't count on it.

How to measure it

The awkward part of GEO is that it's hard to measure. Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode shows up in Search Console together with ordinary search, under the "Web" search type: there's no separate column. For other AI tools the most honest method is hands-on: once a month, ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the questions one of your customers would ask, and note whether and how you appear.

Where to start this week

Write the sentence that describes your business in plain words, and use it word for word on your website and profiles.
Check that your name is identical everywhere, including your Google Business Profile.
List the five questions customers always ask you and answer them on your website, one by one.
Check in Search Console that your important pages are indexed.
Choose a publishing pace you can keep up, even just one article a week.

In short

GEO has no tricks: it's SEO done well, plus clarity.
Generative engines cite consistent entities, factual sentences and answers to real questions.
Keyword stuffing, copy-and-paste pages and shortcuts don't work.
You measure it with Search Console and regular checks done by hand.

If you want to see how AI describes your company today, and what to fix first, let's talk.