How to get your company showing up in ChatGPT and Google

Your customers no longer open ten links to choose a vendor. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google itself, and get a ready-made answer with two or three sources. If your company isn't one of them, it's not part of the conversation.

It already shows in the numbers. A Pew Research Center study published in July 2025 tracked 900 adults in the United States and 68,879 Google searches. When an AI summary was on the page, people clicked a result in 8% of visits. Without the summary, 15%. And clicks on a link inside the summary itself happened in just 1% of visits.

What GEO is, in one sentence

SEO is the work of getting your site to rank well in a list of links. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the work of making your site the source the AI uses to build its answer.

The two go hand in hand. Ahrefs showed in February 2026, analyzing 300,000 keywords, that an AI Overview is associated with a 58% lower click-through rate for the top result. It's a correlation, not proof of cause, but the message is clear: ranking first is no longer enough if the AI answer sits above you. You need to be inside it.

How ChatGPT and Google pick their sources

None of these companies publishes the full recipe. But what they do document covers most cases.

• ChatGPT. OpenAI's documentation explains that the OAI-SearchBot crawler is what puts sites into ChatGPT search answers. Block it and you don't show up in those answers. GPTBot is a different crawler, used to train models. You can block training and still show up in search.
• Perplexity. Perplexity's documentation recommends allowing PerplexityBot in robots.txt to appear in results and says changes can take up to 24 hours to take effect.
• Google. Google Search Central, in December 2025, is clear: to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode, a page needs to be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet in search. “There are no additional technical requirements,” the text says.

In other words: before reaching for tricks, check that the door is open. It's common to find company sites with robots.txt blocking crawlers by mistake, old hosting settings, or a platform that hides the text behind code crawlers can't read.

What your company's site needs

With the door open, the AI picks whoever answers best. In practice, your site needs:

1. Crawlers allowed. Googlebot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot permitted in robots.txt and at the hosting level.
2. Indexed pages. If Google hasn't indexed it, it won't cite it, and there are common reasons a site doesn't show up on Google. Search Console shows you this.
3. Real text. Google recommends keeping important content in text, not just in images or video.
4. A short answer up front. One page per service, with the answer to the customer's question in the first lines: what you do, for whom, where, how to hire you.
5. Facts that can be checked. City, year founded, number of clients, names of the people behind the company. AI prefers to state what it can confirm.
6. Real FAQs. The questions customers ask before buying, answered in 2 or 3 sentences.
7. Consistent structured data. Google asks that structured data match the visible text on the page.
8. An up-to-date business profile. The same Google guide mentions keeping your Business Profile information current.

To be honest: Google says you don't need a special AI file or new markup for AI Overviews. A file like llms.txt, which summarizes the site for language models, is a complement for other AIs, not a Google requirement. Anyone selling it as a magic formula is selling something they don't control.

What to measure

GEO without measurement is guesswork, and results aren't immediate: see how long it takes to show up on Google. Three things to track every month:

• Search Console. Google counts traffic from AI features inside the performance report, under the “Web” search type. Look at impressions, clicks and which pages are climbing.
• Your market's questions. Build a list of 10 to 20 questions your customers would ask (“best physical therapy clinic in Fortaleza,” “solar energy company for retail”) and test them every month in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google. Note who gets cited.
• Leads that come in. Ask every new client where they found you. “I asked ChatGPT” is already a common answer, and it needs to be in your report.

Google itself notes that clicks from pages with AI Overviews tend to be higher quality. Fewer visits, but from people closer to buying. That's why the number that matters is leads, not just visits.

What this means for you

If your company depends on being found, your site needs to be written for two readers: the person and the AI. That doesn't mean redoing everything. It starts with an audit that answers three questions: can crawlers read the site? Are the pages indexed? Does the text answer what customers ask?

We applied this to the Studio Responsivo site itself before offering it to clients. It has a public llms.txt, structured data on every page, FAQs on each service and articles with short answers and sources. You can check it right now.

If you want your company cited when customers ask AI, the Studio's SEO and GEO service runs the audit, ships the technical foundation, publishes content that answers, and measures every month which questions your brand shows up in.