ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are eating the SERP. Here’s the GEO playbook small business owners need to be cited — not just ranked.
Written by Kasun Jayasekera, founder of aibuiltmysite.
Search products increasingly include generated summaries alongside traditional links. The mix changes by query and platform, so treat AI visibility as an addition to accessible, useful web content rather than a replacement for standard search fundamentals.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is a loose industry term for making content understandable and citable by AI-assisted search. There is no guaranteed inclusion method, and many of the same fundamentals still apply: clear facts, accessible pages and trustworthy sources.
Why small business wins GEO
Specific, dated and attributable information is easier for people and machines to evaluate than generic marketing copy. Publish only experience, licences, service areas and results the business can substantiate.
The GEO checklist
- Schema everywhere: LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, Article, Person, BreadcrumbList. Without it, the model has to guess what your page is about.
- Answer the question in the first paragraph. AI summarisation pulls leads, not conclusions buried in paragraph six.
- Lists, lists, lists. Bullet points are easy to extract and easy to cite.
- Specific, substantiated numbers supplied by the business are more useful than vague claims; never invent a result.
- Date every piece of content. Stale-looking pages get filtered out.
- Add an llms.txt at the root of your domain. It’s the AI equivalent of a sitemap.
What llms.txt actually does
llms.txt is an emerging, voluntary convention for summarising a site in plain text. It is not a replacement for robots.txt or a sitemap, and publishing it does not guarantee that an AI system will crawl, cite or surface the site.
We ship one with every site by default. You can read ours at https://aibuiltmysite.com.au/llms.txt.
What gets cited and what gets skipped
Citation behaviour varies by product and query. Original information, clear attribution and accessible page structure make content easier to assess, but no format or markup guarantees a citation.
What to do this quarter
- Add LocalBusiness, Service, and FAQPage schema if you don’t have them.
- Drop an llms.txt at the root of your domain.
- Re-write your homepage so the answer to ‘what does this business do’ is in the first 30 words.
- Date every blog post and case study.
- Get one named, dated quote on every key page.