Your website scores 10 out of 10 on technical SEO. And yet ChatGPT doesn't mention your company when someone asks for a party like you.
That happened to us too. That's exactly where it goes wrong.
Improving AI visibility is not an extra SEO trick. It's a set of concrete changes to your site, your content, and your mentions outside your domain. Below are the six steps we carry out ourselves, in the order that delivers the most.
A marketer at an IT company no longer just searches Google. She types her question into ChatGPT or Perplexity and gets one answer. No ten blue links. One summary with a handful of sources.
That changes the game. In Google you could sit on page two and still catch the occasional click. In an AI answer, page two doesn't exist. You're in it or you don't exist. With a B2B sales cycle of months, that counts heavily, because your potential buyer is orienting early and across multiple channels.
Recognise this? You rank well for your brand name, because anyone who already knows you finds you easily. But on the question "which party can do this for us" you don't surface.
That gap is exactly what AI visibility is about.
An AI assistant does something different from a search engine. It doesn't compile a ranking. It picks a small number of sources, summarises them, and gives one answer.
The whole field around it is called generative engine optimization, or GEO for short. In Dutch it's often called ai zoekmachine optimalisatie. The goal is not to rank, but to be cited.
Three things stand out when we look at that selection:
That last one is the silent killer for SaaS and IT sites. Your beautiful interactive page exists for a visitor, but for the crawler it's a blank sheet.
Start at the front door. Your robots.txt says who may read your site. Many companies at some point accidentally shut everything down, or left it wide open.
The crawlers you want to allow are known and publicly documented. OpenAI has GPTBot, Anthropic has ClaudeBot, Perplexity has PerplexityBot. There's also OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User, Google-Extended, and CCBot.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
User-agent: * block isn't accidentally blocking everything.Important: this is a choice, not an automatic. If you block a crawler, that assistant can't use your content. For some companies that's deliberate. For most B2B parties who want to be found, it's an own goal.
AI assistants love clarity. Structured data is the language you use to tell a machine what something is.
Schema.org is the standard maintained jointly by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex. You drop a piece of markup into your page and say: this is an Organization, this is a Service, this is a FAQPage.
Which types deliver the most in our experience:
This is where entity optimization often goes wrong. Companies have a beautiful site, but not a single machine-readable description of what they actually do. The assistant then has to guess. And guessing usually means: naming someone else.
There's an open initiative called llms.txt. The idea is simple: a text file on your root domain that tells AI models what your most important content is.
It's not an official standard yet. So don't treat it as a proven ranking factor. It is, however, a cheap way to put your most important pages, services, and explanations in one place for a model.
Think of it as a knowledge graph for your own company in one file. Who you are, what you do, where you're strong, and where the rest lives. It costs you an afternoon and it can't hurt.
This is the step with the most upside, and where most sites miss the mark.
An assistant doesn't cite sales talk. It cites a piece of text that directly answers its question. So ChatGPT visibility for your website starts with the question: what question does my customer ask, and am I giving a citable answer to it?
Our experience: start every page or section with the answer, not with the preamble. Whoever reads only the first paragraph has the answer. The explanation comes after.
We also see that this works:
And the opposite works too: content that only loads after a click, or pages full of vague promises without any fact, rarely get cited. That's the core of generative engine optimization in practice.
An assistant doesn't trust you because you say so yourself. It trusts you because others say so too.
That's entity optimization: making sure your brand name, service description, and positioning appear consistently in places outside your own site. Reviews, directories, trade media, partner pages, your Google Business Profile.
Our experience is that companies with a strong, unambiguous entity signature show up more often in AI answers than companies with fragmented positioning. If you describe yourself slightly differently in five places, the model has to puzzle. And puzzling loses to the competitor who says the same thing everywhere.
This is also the step where many drop out. Getting a mention outside your own domain takes time. Press releases, chasing reviews, filling in directories. Annoying work, big effect.
You can't improve what you don't measure, and likes say nothing about whether ChatGPT mentions you.
We measure across four assistants: ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. The method is simple and repeatable. Ask the questions your customer asks too. See whether you're mentioned. And note which source URL appears under which answer.
A checklist for your own measurement:
Do count on a horizon. Making that distinction is half the work of geo-optimization.
These are the mistakes we run into most often.
A spot in an AI answer can't be bought, and guaranteed positions don't exist. Anyone who promises you that is selling air. What you can steer is consistently being the right answer to the questions that matter.
Count on three to six months before the effect is visible and stable. Models and indexes change constantly, so it's not a one-off project. Structural measurement is needed to hold onto mentions.
No. For visitors, interactive content is fine. The point is that the core of your content is also readable for crawlers without JavaScript. Make sure the text itself is server-side, not only in a script that loads later.
Yes, maybe even better than for a large party. An assistant prefers to cite a clear specialist over a broad generalist. A sharp, unambiguous positioning weighs more than size.
Want to know where you stand right now? We measure your site across four assistants with the questions your customer asks. Take the free AI visibility scan and within a few minutes you'll know which answers already mention you, and which don't.