SEO is shifting to GEO — can AI assistants even read your site?

SEO traffic is shifting to GEO. People are asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity questions they used to type into Google, and those answers are increasingly the buying decision.

I felt it myself recently. I needed to register an LLC and asked ChatGPT for the most economical way to set one up with a registered agent. It surfaced a provider I had not seen, half the price of the one I would have defaulted to. Real money, routed by an AI assistant citing whatever sites it could read.

If your site is the cheaper option, the better fit, the right answer, but the AI assistant cannot read it, you are not in that conversation.

When I first asked AI how to approach a GEO strategy, it recommended posting on authoritative platforms so AI assistants would pick me up. The problem is you have no good way to tell whether that is actually working. It turns out AI bots had been knocking on my door (duanegrey.com) and I had been ignoring them for months. Two doors at my own infrastructure were closed and I did not realize it.

First door. No robots.txt and no sitemap.xml deployed. AI bots showed up, hit a 404 on the files they expected, and left.

Second door. The Cloudflare proxy in front of the site had AI crawler user agents in its default deny list. Even after I fixed the first door, traffic was being blocked at the CDN layer before it reached my origin.

I had been building a GEO strategy and simultaneously vetoing it at two layers of my own stack.

The fix took an evening. Deploy robots.txt and sitemap.xml at the origin. Audit the CDN or proxy bot rules and explicitly allow the crawlers you want.

The 10 days after produced 2,328 bot hits across 21 AI and search crawlers. Numbers I would not have seen if I had not taken the time to explore my own logs.

If your marketing depends on AI assistants citing your site, check both doors before you spend another hour on content.