First, check you are not blocking it
Type your website address into a browser and add /robots.txt to the end. That filerobots.txtrobots.txt is a plain text file at the top level of a website that lists which automated visitors are allowed in and which are not. lists which automated visitorsCrawlerA crawler is a program that visits web pages on its own and copies what it finds, so a search engine or AI search can use the contents later. your site allows. Look for the word Disallow underneath any of these names:
- GPTBot and ChatGPT-User, which are OpenAI’s
- ClaudeBot, which is Anthropic’s
- PerplexityBot and Google-Extended
If any of them are disallowed, that is your answer and nothing else on this page matters until it is changed. It is usually accidental. Saying nothing about a visitor generally means it is allowed, so an empty file is rarely the problem.
If the block mentions Cloudflare, or you cannot find it in your own robots.txt at all, read is Cloudflare blocking AI crawlers on my site. That setting overrides the file you wrote, and it has been on by default for new domains since July 2025.
Second, make sure there is something to read
Open one of your important pages, view the page source, and search that raw text for a sentence you know is on the page. If it is there, you are fine. If it is not, your words only exist after code runs in the browser, and a machine that does not wait sees a blank page. Show that to whoever built the site and they will know what to do.
Third, say what you are in ordinary words
Near the top of your homepage there should be a sentence a twelve year old could read that says what you sell and who it is for. Not a slogan. The trade, stated. ChatGPT cannot name you as the best supplier of something if no sentence on your site says you supply it.
This is the cheapest change on the list and it moves more than the expensive ones.
Fourth, get mentioned somewhere that is not your site
When ChatGPT answers a question about your category, it opens a small handful of pages, often around five, and most of them are not yours. They are roundups, comparisons, directories and forum threads. Being named on those pages is what puts you in the answer.
Do this last. Every hour spent getting mentioned elsewhere is wasted while your own site is unreadable, because the machine that follows the mention arrives somewhere it cannot use.
Then measure it, more than once
Ask ChatGPT the question your buyer would ask, without your brand name in it, and see whether you are named. Then ask it twice more. You will often get a different answer, because AI search does not repeat itself exactly. That is why samplingSamplingSampling means asking the same question several times instead of once, because AI search does not give an identical answer every time. matters. Named in two out of three is information. Named once, checked once, is a coin flip.
Two numbers are worth tracking: how often you are named across all your buying questions, and your rate on the specific questions you decided to chase. The second responds to work in weeks. The first takes months.
The long version
What is GEO, and how do you actually do it covers all of this from the beginning, including the parts this page skipped.