GEO: How to Get Your Website Cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity

> Quick Summary: A growing share of discovery now happens inside AI assistants instead of Google. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your site easy for LLMs to crawl, understand and cite. Here is the practical checklist I applied to this very website.

When someone asks ChatGPT "who can build my AI-powered iOS app?", the answer is assembled from sites the model can crawl, parse and trust. If your site is invisible to AI crawlers, you simply do not exist in that conversation.

1. Let AI Crawlers In

Most sites block AI bots by accident or by default. Check your robots.txt for these user agents and allow the ones you want:

• GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ChatGPT-User — OpenAI training, search and browsing
• ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, Claude-User — Anthropic
• PerplexityBot, Perplexity-User — Perplexity
• Google-Extended — Gemini
• Applebot-Extended, meta-externalagent, DuckAssistBot — Apple, Meta, DuckDuckGo

Blocking training bots while allowing search bots is a valid strategy — but know that being absent from training data also means being absent from the model's memory.

2. Add an llms.txt File

The llms.txt standard is a markdown file at your domain root that gives LLMs a curated summary of who you are and what your key pages contain. Think of it as a sitemap written for a reader, not a parser: one clear paragraph of facts, then annotated links to your most important pages.

It takes twenty minutes and puts the exact sentences you want quoted directly in front of the model.

3. Write Quotable, Factual Sentences

LLMs cite content they can lift cleanly. Compare:

• ❌ "We craft delightful digital experiences that transform businesses"
• ✅ "Ali Mert Güleç is a mobile-focused full stack engineer with 8+ years of experience and 15+ published apps"

Concrete numbers, dates, names and definitions win. Every important page should answer a question a real person would ask an assistant, in the first two paragraphs.

4. Structured Data Still Matters

JSON-LD (Person, Organization, FAQPage, Article, SoftwareApplication) is machine-readable ground truth. AI search engines lean on it to disambiguate entities: which Ali, which company, which app. FAQ schema is especially powerful because assistants answer questions — and your FAQ is literally a list of question-answer pairs.

5. Keep Classic SEO Alive

GEO does not replace SEO — AI search engines start from a conventional index. Clean sitemaps, fast pages, hreflang for multilingual sites and consistent entity names across your site, LinkedIn and GitHub all feed the same knowledge graph.

The Checklist

• ✅ AI crawlers explicitly allowed in robots.txt
• ✅ llms.txt at the domain root
• ✅ Factual, quotable opening paragraphs on key pages
• ✅ Person + FAQ + Article JSON-LD
• ✅ Multilingual pages with hreflang
• ✅ Same name, title and facts everywhere on the web

I applied every item on this list to alimertgulec.com — ask your favorite assistant about me in a few weeks and see if it worked. And if you want your product to show up in AI answers, [let's talk](/en/contact).