How to show up in ChatGPT's answers, a guide to GEO

To get into an answer, you need to understand how one gets made. And contrary to what most people think, an AI assistant knows almost nothing about your business.

It has two memories. The first is what it learned during training, a vast read of the web, frozen at a given date and refreshed only when a new version comes out. If your business is small or new, it isn't in there, or only vaguely. The second is live search. As soon as a question involves a concrete choice, a provider, a price, opening hours, assistants search the web on the spot, read a handful of pages, then write their answer from what they found there.

That second memory is the one that matters to you, because it's the one that settles the questions that bring in customers. It works in three steps.

1. It searches. The AI turns the question into a few searches in a search engine's index: Google's for Gemini, notably Bing's for ChatGPT and Copilot, and an index of its own for Perplexity. A page that isn't in these indexes has no chance of being read.
2. It reads. From the results, it opens a few pages, often fewer than 10, and pulls out whatever answers the question. A page that's slow, confusing or closed to bots gets dropped without a second thought.
3. It cross-checks, then it picks. It keeps the names that come up from one source to the next, and the facts that match. A caterer mentioned on its own site, in a regional wedding guide and in 30 customer reviews carries far more weight than one that only talks about itself.

Remember that last step, because everything else follows from it. An AI assistant doesn't believe what you say about yourself. It believes what the web says about you, when several sources say the same thing.

Google ranked you. AI recommends you, and no one recommends what they haven't been able to verify.

You hear everywhere that traditional SEO is dead. That's wrong. If anything, it's the opposite. Since AI assistants search the engines' indexes before they answer, a site that ranks poorly on Google and Bing starts with a handicap nothing can make up for. Google is still the front door, too. In France, nearly 89% of searches still go through it.

But SEO alone isn't enough anymore, because the two games don't reward quite the same things.

That last row changes everything. On Google, you had a second chance. A so-so title could be saved by a great page. In an AI answer, the customer reads what the machine understood about you, in its own words. If your site is vague, the answer will be vague. If your prices aren't written anywhere, it will say “price on request,” or cite the prices of a competitor who posts theirs.

And clicks are getting scarcer. A Pew Research Center study of nearly 69,000 searches found that people click a link 8% of the time when Google shows an AI Overview, versus 15% without one. Visibility is increasingly won in the answer itself, before anyone even visits.

Before you change anything, see where you stand. It's free, it's quick, and it's often a much-needed wake-up call.

1. Write down five questions your customers actually ask you. Not “caterer lyon,” which is a Google search, but a full sentence, the way you'd say it to a friend, like “Who does buffets for an 80-person wedding near Lyon?” or “How much does a wedding caterer cost?”
2. Put them to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot. Use a private browsing window, logged out if you can, so your history doesn't skew the answer.
3. Note three things each time. Are you cited? In what position? And in what terms? Is what the AI says about you accurate, up to date, flattering?
4. Look at the sources. Most assistants show the pages they checked. That's the exact list of places where you need to exist.

That last point is the most valuable. If the answers all lean on the same regional comparison site, an industry directory or a forum thread, you know where to focus your efforts. No need to guess what the AI reads. It shows you.

It's the silliest trap, and one of the most common. Your site shuts its door on AI bots without you knowing it. Every site has a small file, robots.txt, that tells search engine bots where they're allowed to go. One misplaced line, and your site becomes invisible to an assistant, while nothing changes for your visitors.

Each assistant sends its own bots, and they don't all do the same job. Some read the web to train future models, others fetch a page the moment someone asks a question. At OpenAI, for example, GPTBot is used for training, while OAI-SearchBot powers ChatGPT's search. You're free to block the first and allow the second. Your content won't be used to train a model, but ChatGPT can still cite you. OpenAI puts it in black and white. A site that blocks OAI-SearchBot won't appear in its search answers.

Google keeps it simpler. Its AI Overviews rely on the search engine's usual crawler. If you're doing well on Google, they can read your site.

That leaves two checks, to do yourself or to hand to whoever handles your site.

• The robots.txt file. You'll find it at your site's address followed by /robots.txt. If you see “Disallow: /” under OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot or Bingbot, those assistants can't read your site.
• Your host and your security service. Some security services now block part of the AI bots by default. Cloudflare is one of them, and it protects a huge share of the world's websites. Since July 2025, every new site there is asked to choose, and blocking is the default setting. The intent is good, but if no one made that choice knowingly, you may be shut off from ChatGPT without ever deciding to be.

While you're at it, make sure your site exists for Bing too. It's easy to forget, since hardly anyone around us uses it, but it's one of the indexes ChatGPT and Copilot rely on. Signing up for Bing Webmaster Tools is free, takes 15 minutes, and lets you check that Bing knows your pages.

Reread your homepage as if you were a machine in a hurry, looking for something to answer “How much does a caterer for 80 people near Lyon cost?” What does it find? Most of the time, “Authentic flavors for life's special moments,” “A passionate team at your service,” “Feel free to reach out.” Not one number, not one city, not one timeline. Nothing an AI could quote.

An AI assistant cites facts. It can't cite a vibe. The pages that make it into answers almost always have five things in common.

• They answer in the very first sentence. The question in the heading, the answer right below it, the nuances after. That's how a good news article is built, and it's exactly what an AI comes looking for.
• They give numbers. A price range, a turnaround time, a capacity, a service area. “From €45 per person, drinks included, within 60 km of Lyon” will get picked up. “Custom pricing” never will.
• They give each important question its own page. One page for weddings, one for corporate events, one for pricing. A catch-all page that covers everything answers nothing precisely.
• They're signed and dated. A text with a real author, an update date and sources earns more trust, from readers and machines alike, than an anonymous text of unknown age.
• They talk like your customers. Your customers don't say “event hospitality services,” they say “wedding caterer.” The words of your trade aren't the words in their questions.

A well-made FAQ is the most cost-effective tool here. Take the 10 questions people ask you on the phone and answer them in writing, straight, in three or four sentences each. That's exactly the format an AI draws its answers from, and it's also what your visitors read first.

This is the step most businesses forget, and it's often the one that decides. Remember, an AI assistant cross-checks. Your site says you're the best caterer in Lyon. Fine. But what does everyone else say?

When the question is about choosing, the pages assistants check most are rarely the businesses' own sites. They're comparison sites, local guides, industry directories, the regional press, customer reviews, and forums where strangers share their experience. That's where you need to exist.

• Your Google Business Profile, kept meticulously up to date. Hours, exact category, service area, recent photos, a precise description. It's a top source for any local question, and it's free.
• The same information everywhere. Same name, same address, same phone number, same hours on your site, your Google profile, PagesJaunes (France's Yellow Pages), your social media and your industry's directories. An AI that finds two different addresses hesitates, and an AI that hesitates cites someone else.
• Plenty of recent reviews. They feed straight into the answers. When an AI writes “known for its dessert buffets,” it's often summing up your reviews. Ask every happy customer for one, right when they thank you.
• Your industry's directories and guides. Your region's wedding vendor guide, the list of certified craftspeople, your trade association's website. Those are exactly the pages an AI opens to compare.
• Local press and your partners. An article in the regional paper, a mention on the website of a venue where you often work, a referral swap with a photographer. Every outside voice backs up yours.

None of this is technical. It takes consistency, not a budget. And that's good news. On this ground, a small, serious business can beat a big brand that's coasting on its name.

Every new topic attracts its shortcuts. Three come up often, and none of them holds up.

• The llms.txt file, sold as the answer. Proposed in 2024, this file sums up a site for AI tools. The idea is appealing, but no major assistant has announced using it to decide who to cite, and Google has said publicly that it doesn't use it. It does no harm. It won't make the difference, either.
• Hidden text for bots. Invisible instructions slipped into a page to sway AI tools. It's manipulation, search engines know how to spot it, and the day they do, your whole site loses their trust.
• A guaranteed top spot on ChatGPT. Nobody controls what an AI answers, not even the people who build it. A provider who promises you a specific spot is selling you something they don't own. What anyone can honestly promise is measurable work and regular tracking of where you show up.

Nor can you buy your way into an answer. Ads are starting to appear around some assistants' answers, but they're labeled as ads and kept separate from the recommendation. The recommendation itself can't be bought, and that's exactly what makes it valuable in your customers' eyes.

It depends on which memory you're aiming for. With live search, the one that matters, results can come fast. A new or fixed page, once search engines know about it, can be read and cited within a few weeks. Training memory is slower. You have to wait for the next versions of the models, and that takes months.

In practice, allow three months to see movement on the simplest questions, and six months to firmly establish your name on the ones that matter. That's the same pace as traditional SEO, and for the same reason. The web needs time to start talking about you.

To measure progress, rerun the test from the start of this guide every month, with the same questions, and track the changes. Check your site analytics too. Visitors sent by ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini often show up under the assistant's name among your traffic sources. There aren't many of them yet, but they arrive already convinced.

If you only do five things, make it these, in this order.

1. Run the five-question test on four assistants, and save the answers. That's your starting point.
2. Check that AI assistants can read your site, first the robots.txt file, then your host's settings.
3. Update your Google Business Profile, and make your details match everywhere you're listed.
4. Write a page that gives a straight answer to the question your customers ask most, prices and timelines included.
5. Ask for a review from each of your last 10 happy customers.

None of this requires understanding how AI works. It takes what has always built a business's reputation: saying clearly what you do, keeping your information up to date, and doing good enough work that others talk about it. AI didn't invent anything. It just made visible, and much faster, the word of mouth that has always decided which business your customers choose.

And if you'd rather have us handle it with you, that's exactly what our ongoing SEO and GEO support is for.