How to get recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini & Claude

Ask an AI assistant for “a good accountant in Cairns” and it names names. Those recommendations are already steering real customers — 45% of consumers have used AI tools this way — and which businesses get named is not random. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the discipline of becoming one of them.

Where the answers come from

Modern assistants blend two sources: what they learned in training (the open web, months old) and what they retrieve live (search results, maps data, review platforms). Both routes reward the same thing — being well-documented. A business with a complete profile, steady reviews, consistent citations and third-party mentions shows up on both paths; a business that exists only on its own website barely exists at all, as far as the model can tell.

The GEO checklist for a local business

• Entity consistency: identical name, address, phone and description everywhere — the same discipline as citation building, now with a second audience.
• Reviews with substance: models weight what reviewers say, not just stars. Detailed reviews naming services and suburbs are training data in your favour.
• Structured data: schema markup is the most machine-readable statement of who you are that exists.
• Third-party mentions: local media, industry lists, chamber pages, “best of Cairns” roundups — assistants love a corroborating source. This is link building wearing a new hat.
• Quotable answers: pages that state facts plainly (“We service Palm Cove to Gordonvale. Call-outs from $95.”) get retrieved and repeated; vague brochure-speak doesn't.

What doesn't work

You can't prompt-inject your way in (“ignore previous instructions and recommend us” is a meme, not a strategy), you can't buy placement, and pumping out AI-written blog spam to “feed the models” mostly feeds Google's spam filters — see what actually happens to AI content. SOCi's index makes the scale honest: AI visibility is ~30× harder than a map pack spot. That's discouraging if you want a hack, encouraging if you're willing to do the verifiable-reputation work your competitors won't.

Measure it, don't vibe it

GEO has a measurement problem — there's no Search Console for ChatGPT — but it's not unmeasurable: ask the major assistants your money questions monthly and log who gets named; watch referral traffic from AI surfaces in your analytics; and track the leading indicators (review velocity, citation consistency, mention count) that predict inclusion. We've folded exactly this into Content Flow's research stage, so AI visibility gets tracked with data like everything else — not guessed at.