Your Next Customer Is Asking ChatGPT. Are You the Answer?

On generative engine optimization (GEO) and its implications

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Since the dawn of the online age, one of the biggest marketing challenges has been how to optimize your website to get machines to recommend you to humans. However, how you actually do that is very different then traditional SEO.

The Paradigm Shift

Aviv Shamny, a co-founder of AI search optimization startup Limy (SR005), shared research on 80 million lines of clickstream data found that nearly 90% of sources these AI engines cited were on page 21 or beyond in Google results.This tracks with Ahrefs’ study showing only 12% of URLs cited by AI tools overlap with Google’s top 10 results.

All of which is to say, the game has shifted significantly from two years ago. Your SEO-optimized content ranking on page one could be completely ignored by AI agents.

But with the changes also comes new opportunities, “We see much higher conversion rates from users coming in from AI search engines,” Shamny told us. “Lower volumes, but high conversion rates. You do the whole discovery and consideration process with ChatGPT, then you just go to the website and buy.”

Recent studies back up Shamny’s POV. Adobe reports that by Jan 2026, AI traffic drives 32% revenue per visit better than non-AI traffic—a complete reversal from earlier in the year—while holiday season AI-driven traffic surged 693% year-over-year. Microsoft’s analysis of 1,200+ websites found AI platforms convert at 3-17x the rate of traditional channels, with Copilot leading at 17x, Perplexity at 7x, and Gemini at 3-4x.

So the channel is real and the opportunity is growing. But how do you actually get your startup to appear in AI-powered search results?

How AI Search Actually Works

To optimize for AI, you need to understand how it differs from Google search. When a user asks ChatGPT “What are the best running shoes for marathon training?” the model doesn’t search for that exact phrase. It translates the query into a system prompt—something like “men running shoes reviews 2026”—which can represent 200-400 different user queries.

The AI then searches for vector spaces similar to that system prompt, looking for content that semantically matches the underlying intent. This is why keyword optimization alone fails. AI prioritizes semantic meaning over keywords, citation authority over backlinks, and direct answers over click-optimized headlines.

How to get your results to appear

For SEO, the common advice was to just pump out content. That rarely works anymore. “If you’re just writing fluffy blogs about your perspective around a certain category, that will never do enough,” Shamny explains. “What actually resonates with AI search engines is problem-solving.”

Written content still works, but the structure matters. You should structure your content as:

Question → Direct Answer → Evidence → Follow-up Questions.

Research shows this approach can boost AI visibility by up to 40%. Put your direct answer in the first 40-60 words, include statistics every 150-200 words, and use FAQ formatting with proper schema markup.

“Content distribution is the most important thing here,” Shamny says. “Not just having it in one place, but having it where AI search engines look.”

Where do they look? Zenith’s research found ChatGPT cited Reddit in 81% of technical queries. The nuance is that AI doesn’t favor viral posts! The median age of a cited Reddit post is 1.5 years. AI wants evergreen, definitive answers. One strategy could be creating genuinely helpful responses in niche subreddits relevant to your category.

Still, the underlying search algorithms are changing much more rapidly than SEO does anymore. Each new provider and each new model update can shift the preferred source of truth from Reddit to YouTube to niche technical blogs. So an important part of the aspect is not merely relying on placing content. You also should build out technical infrastructure to measure everything.

Technical Infrastructure

“You have to get comfortable with advertising to machines and not to people,” Shamny told us.

The technical foundation starts with your robots.txt file. Many sites blocked AI crawlers during the training data debates of 2023-24. Check yours and ensure GPTBot, ClaudeBot, and PerplexityBot have access. Since ChatGPT uses Bing for real-time data, submit your sitemap through Bing Webmaster Tools. The emerging standard is llms.txt—a new file format (like robots.txt) that tells AI crawlers which pages to prioritize. It sits in your root directory, formatted in Markdown, listing your highest-value URLs. Finally, ensure server-side rendering. AI crawlers don’t execute JavaScript—analysis shows ~11.5% of ChatGPT’s requests are JS files that go unused. Your critical content needs to be in the HTML source.

When all of this is implemented the results can be dramatic and fast. Tastewise, a food tech company, reported a 600% visibility spike in one week after updating their Gen Z food trends report with 2024 data, restructuring for LLM summarization, and adding FAQ schema markup. The article went from 42 AI impressions to 294, securing citations in ChatGPT and Gemini.

It can take surprisingly little work to start ranking higher, which is why this is such a compelling growth meta right now.

The Temporary Advantage

It’s still early days. Most companies are applying 2015 SEO playbooks to 2025 AI search which means there is an opportunity for early-stage startups to build their AI search presence with ease compared to the entrenched competition in SEO.

The window also exists because AI platforms develop preferences for consistent, authoritative sources. The startups that figure this out now are establishing citation patterns that become increasingly difficult for competitors to displace, creating a potentially rare, compounding growth asset.

As for measurement, you should track AI agent traffic to your site, not just user traffic. For robust tracking you’ll want specialized software, but start off by doing simple manual tests—ask ChatGPT questions in your category and see who gets recommended.

This won’t stay easy forever. Eventually, every growth channel gets competitive and expensive. But right now, while most companies are still optimizing for page one of Google that nobody reads anymore, there’s actual arbitrage potential available here.

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