What has changed.
Your customers no longer type “web agency Wavre” into Google alone. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini: “which company could rebuild my site in Walloon Brabant?”, and receive a written answer, with a few names and a few sources. If you are not in that answer, you are not on the list.
In an AI answer, there is no page two.
The three conditions for being cited.
Be accessible
The crawlers of answer engines have to be able to read your site: an open robots.txt, a properly configured firewall, content visible without JavaScript.
Be quotable
Pages that answer the questions directly, with precise, dated facts that are easy to draw from.
Be recognised
A company described the same way on your site, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn, directories and the press.
Step 1: let the right crawlers in.
OpenAI uses several crawlers with distinct roles. OAI-SearchBot indexes sites for ChatGPT's search answers: without it, your pages cannot be cited there. ChatGPT-User visits a page when a user asks it to. GPTBot collects content for model training. Each is configured separately.
User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Allow: /
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /The most common pitfall is not robots.txt but the firewall: anti-bot rules that are too broad block these legitimate visitors without anyone noticing. We check both, along with the crawlers of Perplexity and Google.
Step 2: write content AI can quote.
The answer first
Every page opens with two or three sentences that answer directly: who, what, for whom, where.
The real questions
Questions phrased the way your customers put them to an AI, with short, complete answers.
Readable structures
Explicit headings, lists and comparison tables: formats answer engines draw from easily.
Dated facts
Visible update dates, precise and verifiable information rather than marketing phrases.
Step 3: help engines understand who you are.
- 01
Structured data
Organisation, address, areas served, services, opening hours, reviews and frequent questions described in JSON-LD on your site.
- 02
Entity consistency
The same name, address, services and description on the site, the Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and professional directories.
- 03
Mentions on third-party sources
Articles, interviews, partners, federations and recognised directories: answer engines lean heavily on what others say about you.
- 04
Indexing in Bing
Several answer engines rely in part on Bing's index. Bing Webmaster Tools and IndexNow speed up how quickly your pages are taken into account.
Step 4: measure, do not assume.
We put together a set of around thirty real customer questions, such as “which Odoo integrator in Belgium?” or “who can build a mobile app in Brussels?”. Each month we put them to ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews, and track how often your company is cited against your competitors.
| Indicator | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Citation rate | The share of questions in the set where your company is mentioned |
| Position in the answer | Cited first, among others, or at the end of the answer |
| Sources used | The pages of your site or the third-party sites the AI relies on |
| Accuracy | Whether what the AI says about you is correct and up to date |
| Share of voice | Your visibility compared with that of your competitors |
With an eye on what comes next.
Answer engines are becoming an acquisition channel in their own right, and AI agents are starting to compare and contact providers on behalf of their users. Companies that structure their presence today take a lead that will be hard to close. It is the SEO of 2010, with one difference: catching up will be slower. To begin, a GEO audit shows within days what AI already says about you.