The Geoptim GEO guide
Generative Engine Optimization is the work of making a website readable and quotable by AI assistants. This Geoptim guide covers it in five parts: allowing AI crawlers in robots.txt, publishing an llms.txt, adding Schema.org JSON-LD, writing an FAQ that answers real questions, and installing the files.
Each guide is self-contained, but they build on each other. If you are starting from scratch, read them in the order below.
What GEO is, in one paragraph
For twenty-five years, being found online meant ranking in a list of links. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot changed the shape of that answer: they read sources and write a reply, and the visitor often never sees a result page at all. GEO is the set of practices that decide whether your website is one of the sources behind that reply, or invisible to it. It does not replace SEO. It sits on top of it, and it depends on things SEO never had to care about, starting with whether AI crawlers are allowed in at all.
The recommended order
The four building blocks are not interchangeable, and doing them out of order wastes effort. Access has to come before comprehension, and comprehension before content work.
- robots.txt decides whether AI agents can read your site at all. Nothing downstream matters if the answer is no.
- llms.txt gives models a clean, first-party description of your business instead of leaving them to infer one.
- Schema.org JSON-LD states your facts in machine-readable form: legal name, address, services, questions answered.
- A GEO FAQ page turns real customer questions into short, extractable answers.
- Installation puts all four live on your platform, whether that is WordPress, Webflow, Shopify or plain HTML.
If you would rather see where you currently stand before reading anything, the free Geoptim analysis scores a website out of 100 across those same four categories in about a minute.
robots.txt: controlling AI access to your website
Which AI user agents to allow, how the rules are actually evaluated, and the default CMS settings that quietly block GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot.
llms.txt: the file that speaks to AI for you
What the convention is, what belongs in the file, a complete commented example, where to publish it and how often to revisit it.
Schema.org JSON-LD: structuring your data for AI
Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage and Article: which types matter, how to cross-reference them with @id, and how to validate the result.
GEO-optimized FAQ: get cited in AI responses
How to choose questions people actually ask, how long an answer should be to stay quotable, and why a generic FAQ page earns no citations.
How to install your GEO files on your website
Step-by-step instructions for WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace and static sites, plus how to check that each file is served correctly.
Going further
The guides cover implementation. If you want the reasoning behind them, the Geoptim blog looks at the strategy: how GEO differs from SEO, how assistants pick their sources, and the five criteria of an AI-ready website.
Geoptim can also generate all four files for you from an analysis of your own pages, rather than from a template. The scope of each pack is on the pricing page, and the FAQ answers the practical questions about what you receive and how to deploy it.