AI has quickly become part of everyday life. More and more consumers are using generative chat tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity to compare their options before they buy. They are not necessarily searching Google less, but they are increasingly doing their research inside a chat window and arriving at your website already narrowed down to a shortlist.

That changes the job. In the AI era, businesses need to think about not only what it takes to rank a website in Google Search, but also what it takes to be the source an AI tool reaches for when someone asks about your service.

The good news is that the two are largely the same job. Here is how it works, and what we do about it.

What is generative engine optimisation?

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making your website the source that AI tools cite when they answer questions about your product or service. Where traditional SEO aims to win a click from a results page, GEO aims to win a mention inside an AI generated answer, along with the link that sits beside it.

In practice, GEO means three things: making sure AI crawlers can actually read your website, publishing genuinely useful content that answers the specific questions people ask an AI, and building enough of a presence elsewhere on the web that AI tools recognise your business as a credible answer.

The two places your business can appear

There are two distinct surfaces here, and they behave differently.

Google AI Overviews

From mid 2024, Google began rolling out AI Overviews, and they are now a common sight for Australian searchers. An Overview sits at the top of the results page, sends the query to Google’s Gemini model, and returns a summarised answer with a handful of cited sources.

One thing worth knowing: AI Overviews do not simply summarise the top ten organic results. Google regularly cites pages that rank well outside the first page. That is an opportunity. If you have the single most thorough answer to a specific question, you can get cited even when a bigger competitor outranks you for the broad head term.

Generative AI chat tools

ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity all run on large language models trained on enormous volumes of text. That training data is what the model knows from memory. Separately, most of these tools can now search the live web during a conversation and cite what they find.

This distinction matters more than people realise. Getting into training data is slow, indirect and largely out of your control. Getting cited in live search is fast, measurable, and something you can influence directly. Almost everything below targets the second one.

GEO versus SEO: what actually overlaps

The playbook for ranking on Google and the playbook for being cited by AI are close enough that doing one properly gets you most of the way to the other.

Both come down to the same underlying move: turn your website into an encyclopedia about your product or service. Google wants to show searchers the most helpful resource available. AI tools want to cite the clearest, most complete explanation they can find. Those are the same target from two angles.

Where GEO differs is in emphasis. AI tools reward content that answers a specific question directly and in a self-contained way, because they are extracting passages rather than ranking pages. A 3,000 word guide that buries the answer in paragraph fourteen will lose to a 900 word article that answers the question in its first two sentences and then explains the nuance.

Step one: check that AI crawlers can reach your site

None of this works if the crawlers are blocked, and blocked crawlers are more common than you would expect. Cloudflare and several other providers have shipped settings that block AI bots by default, so plenty of site owners have blocked them without ever making a decision about it.

The crawlers to know about, because they do different jobs and are controlled separately:

• GPTBot collects data for training OpenAI’s models
• OAI-SearchBot builds the index ChatGPT uses when it searches
• ChatGPT-User fetches a page live when a user’s question requires it
• ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot do the equivalent jobs for Claude
• PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User for Perplexity
• Google-Extended controls whether your content is used for Gemini, and it has no effect on how you rank in Google Search

Blocking one is not blocking the others, and allowing training while blocking search is a genuine option some businesses reasonably choose.

To check where you stand, do not rely on asking a chatbot whether it can see your site. That test is unreliable in both directions: a successful live fetch tells you nothing about whether you are in the search index, and a failure might just be one user agent hitting one rule. Check it properly instead:

1. Open yourdomain.com.au/robots.txt and look for disallow rules naming the agents above
2. In Cloudflare, check the AI bot and crawler controls under your security settings
3. Look at your server logs or Cloudflare analytics and confirm you are actually seeing hits from those user agents

Site speed matters here too. AI crawlers generally work with a smaller crawl budget than Googlebot, so a slow site is less likely to be crawled in full. The same applies when a tool is fetching your page live in the middle of a conversation. If it times out, you are simply not in the answer.

Step two: build the encyclopedia

The most reliable way to get cited is to publish the best available answer to the questions people are actually asking.

A quick way to find those questions is to ask the AI tools themselves. Try: “What questions do people most often ask you about tummy tuck surgery in Australia?” You will get a list. Each item on that list is a potential article.

For a surgeon offering abdominoplasty, that list might look like:

• Does Medicare cover tummy tuck surgery in Australia? Understanding item 30177
• Full, mini or extended tummy tuck: which one is right for you?
• Tummy tuck recovery week by week: what to expect
• Can a tummy tuck fix muscle separation? Diastasis recti repair explained
• What affects the cost of a tummy tuck in Australia?

Then write each one properly. That means covering the nuance, the exceptions, the numbers and the things a patient would only learn in consultation. Thin content spun out by an AI will not get cited by an AI, because it adds nothing the model does not already have.

Two habits make a real difference to how citable a page is. First, answer the question in the opening two sentences, in a sentence that makes sense on its own if it were lifted out of the page. Second, use the actual question as your heading, phrased the way a person would type or say it.

Step three: get talked about elsewhere

This is the part most GEO advice skips, and it is arguably the bigger lever.

Language models do not just read what you say about yourself. They synthesise from everything the web says about you. When someone asks an AI tool to recommend an ENT specialist in Adelaide, the answer is assembled from directory listings, review sites, news mentions, industry roundups, forum threads and comparison articles, alongside the practice websites themselves.

Which means a genuinely useful off-site presence does work that on-site content cannot:

• Consistent listings across Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and the directories relevant to your industry, with identical name, address and phone details
• Third party mentions in roundups, local media, industry publications and association directories
• Community presence where your customers already discuss their options, including Reddit and forums, which are heavily represented in both training data and live search results
• Entity clarity, meaning it is unambiguous who you are, what you do and where you do it, so a model does not confuse you with a similarly named business interstate

If your business is invisible everywhere except your own website, an AI tool has only your word to go on. That rarely produces a confident recommendation.

Step four: structured data and the technical layer

If your site is already technically sound for SEO, there is not much extra to do. A few things are worth checking:

Schema markup. Organisation, LocalBusiness, Person, Service, Article and FAQPage schema will not force an AI tool to cite you, but they remove ambiguity about what your pages are and how your business is structured. Cheap to implement, no downside.

Google Business Profile. For anything with local intent, your profile is a direct input into local AI answers. Keep the categories, services, hours and description accurate and current.

Bing Webmaster Tools. Microsoft Copilot draws on Bing, so being properly indexed there is worth the ten minutes it takes to verify your site.

llms.txt. You will see this mentioned as an emerging standard, a file that tells AI tools how to read your site. No major provider has confirmed using it. It costs almost nothing to add if you want to, but it should not be anywhere near the top of your list.

Local GEO: showing up for Adelaide searches

Local optimisation for AI looks much like local SEO. Mention your city and region naturally through your content where it is genuinely relevant, and keep your listings consistent.

The additional move is to write content that only a local business could write. “What does x cost in Adelaide?” or “How does the process work in South Australia?” are questions national competitors cannot answer with any authority. Local specifics like state regulations, regional pricing context, referral pathways and travel considerations are exactly the material an AI tool needs when someone adds a location to their question.

GEO in regulated industries: AHPRA and TGA

This is where healthcare, NDIS and legal businesses need to be more careful than the general advice allows, and it is the part almost nobody writing about GEO addresses.

For registered health practitioners, everything you publish is advertising a regulated health service under the National Law. The advertising guidelines and the cosmetic surgery guidelines constrain what you can say: no testimonials in advertising you control, no claims that create an unreasonable expectation of benefit, no offers that work as an inducement, and pricing information that is complete and clear rather than used as a hook. TGA rules add another layer, including restrictions on naming prescription-only substances in advertising to the public.

Three things follow for GEO specifically.

AI paraphrasing strips your qualifiers. If your carefully hedged sentence sits three paragraphs away from the claim it qualifies, a model summarising your page may keep the claim and drop the hedge. The fix is to write self-contained sentences that carry their own qualification, so any single passage remains compliant when it is lifted out of context. This is good compliance practice and better GEO at the same time, because self-contained passages are exactly what gets cited.

Question-led content is compliance-friendly. Explaining risks, recovery, candidacy and what a procedure cannot do is both what patients ask an AI and what the guidelines want you to communicate. The compliant version of a page is usually the more useful one.

Off-site presence needs care. The advice to build third party mentions runs into the testimonial rules. Patient reviews on platforms you do not control are generally acceptable, but you cannot solicit them or pull them into your own advertising. Get advice on where the line sits for your registration before you build a review strategy.

If you are in a regulated industry, treat the general GEO playbook as a starting point and run your content through a compliance check before it goes live. The guidelines are updated periodically, so work from the current published version rather than what was true two years ago.

How to track whether you are showing up

Ask the questions your customers ask. Keep a list of ten to twenty real questions and run them through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot on a schedule, noting whether you appear and who does. It is manual, but it is the most direct signal available, and there are now tools that automate the tracking if you want to scale it.

Measure the referral traffic in GA4. AI tools do send referral traffic, but GA4 has no built in channel group for it, so by default it lands in Referral or Organic Social and gets lost. Build a custom channel group, or a segment in an exploration, using a hostname regex along these lines:

chatgpt\.com|chat\.openai\.com|perplexity\.ai|claude\.ai|gemini\.google\.com|copilot\.microsoft\.com

Once that is in place, and assuming you have conversion tracking on your enquiry forms, you can see not just how much AI traffic you get but how well it converts. In our experience it often converts better than general organic traffic, because the visitor has already done their comparison in the chat.

Watch your server logs for the crawler user agents listed earlier. If OAI-SearchBot has never visited, you have a crawling problem, not a content problem.

How long does it take?

For a brand new website, expect two to four weeks before you see anything in Google or in AI tools. For an established site publishing new content, tools that search the live web can pick up a new page within days once it is indexed, though a fortnight is a more realistic expectation.

Influencing what a model knows from its training data is a much longer game, measured in model releases rather than weeks. That is another reason to focus your effort on being findable in live search.

Frequently asked questions

Is showing up in AI chat the same as ranking on Google?

Not the same, but closely related. The work overlaps heavily, because both reward being the most useful resource on a topic. The differences are in emphasis: AI tools extract passages rather than rank pages, so direct self-contained answers matter more, and they weigh what other sites say about you more heavily than Google does. You can also be cited in an AI answer while ranking outside the first page of Google, and the reverse happens too.

Do I need to do anything technical to my website?

Usually very little, if your site is already technically sound. Confirm AI crawlers are not blocked in Cloudflare or robots.txt, make sure the site loads quickly, and add basic schema markup. That covers most of it.

Should I block AI crawlers to protect my content?

It depends on your model. If your website exists to generate enquiries, blocking search crawlers removes you from a growing discovery channel for no real benefit. If your business sells the content itself, the calculation is different. You can block training crawlers while allowing search crawlers, which is a reasonable middle ground for many businesses.

Will AI search kill my organic traffic?

Some informational traffic is being absorbed by AI answers, particularly simple lookups. High intent traffic is holding up better, and it is arriving more qualified. The businesses feeling this most are those relying on thin top-of-funnel content. The response is the same as it has always been: be the resource worth clicking through to.

The short version

GEO is not a separate discipline bolted onto SEO. It is SEO done properly, with three additions: make sure the crawlers can reach you, write answers that stand on their own when quoted, and make sure the rest of the web has something to say about you.

If you are in a regulated industry, add a fourth: write it so that any single sentence stays compliant when an AI lifts it out of context.

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Caffeinated Marketing is a boutique digital marketing agency based in the Adelaide Hills, specialising in AHPRA and TGA compliant marketing for medical and healthcare practices. If you want to know how your practice currently appears in AI search, get in touch.