GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: your website is built so that AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews can read it, understand it and cite it correctly. This matters more and more because answers increasingly appear directly in search. Google has shown AI Overviews in Germany since March 2025. According to a Sistrix analysis of more than 100 million keywords, they appear for around 20 percent of searches, and there the click-through rate for position 1 falls from 27 to 11 percent.
How is it different from SEO?
Classic SEO aims for your page to rank high in the results list and get clicked. GEO aims for the AI to present your company correctly in its answer and name it as a source. Much overlaps: what is clearly written and technically clean for people is also understood by an AI. What is new is that individual sentences from your page get taken over as answers. Those sentences have to make sense on their own.
One thing up front: nobody can make an AI recommend a particular company. Anyone promising that is selling hot air. What you can influence is whether the AI can read your page and reproduce your facts correctly.
Nine steps to better visibility in AI answers
- Allow crawlers. Check your robots.txt. Many websites accidentally block AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot.
- Make content readable without JavaScript. If text only appears after a script loads, many crawlers see an empty page.
- Write one clear sentence: who, what, where. For example: "We are an agency from Hamburg for AI automation, web apps and content." AI assistants take over exactly this kind of sentence.
- Answer questions the way they are asked. Use questions as subheadings, with the answer directly underneath in the first sentence.
- Use structured data. Schema.org markup such as Organization, Service or FAQPage makes your facts machine-readable.
- Create an llms.txt. A short text file in the root directory that summarises services, prices and contact details for AI systems. The standard is young and takes little effort.
- Provide quotable facts. Prices, deadlines, figures with a source. Vague marketing language does not get cited.
- Be present outside your own website. A complete Google Business Profile and entries in industry directories are used heavily by AI assistants.
- Test regularly. Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google the questions your customers ask and note what comes back. A single test says little; the trend over months says a lot.
How we do this on our own website
On levisteria.com we implemented exactly these steps: AI crawlers are allowed, the site is static and readable without JavaScript, there is structured data for the company and FAQ, and an llms.txt with our services and prices. The questions in our FAQ are worded so that they make sense even without the page.
Sources
- Sistrix: AI Overviews in Germany: how much click rates really drop (February 2026, German)
- t3n: GEO instead of SEO: becoming visible in AI answers (German)
- BIHK: Webinar "GEO is the new SEO" (February 2026, German)
