Ranking well on Google does not mean an AI can see you. Why GEO decides whether ChatGPT and others know you.
These days a modern, fast website is no longer enough on its own. There is a lot more to it. SEO alone is not enough either. A page that ranks well on Google does not mean an AI will see it.
The trend is moving more and more towards people asking an AI who, for example, the next good roofer in the area is. If a website is not built for that, it will not be listed there at all.
If you are a business owner reading this, feel free to try it yourself. Ask a chat AI (ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok or similar) about your industry. If you do not show up there, now is the right time to get in touch with me.
With the current AI wave, websites have to be made readable for these systems too. This is exactly where GEO comes in, Generative Engine Optimization. It is technically doable, but on older platforms it simply was not considered.
What you have to do: give the AI a clear description of the website. There is a standardised format and a fixed path for this that an AI reads by itself.
This file is called llms.txt and sits right in the root directory, at /llms.txt. It is a plain text file that summarises, in clear language, what the site is about: who is behind it, what the services are and where the important content lives. Think of it like a sitemap, only not for search engines but for language models. This site here has one too, by the way, at nucez.com/llms.txt.
An AI has no interest in analysing the whole website, so it looks specifically for this description.
If you want to know whether your website is visible to AI, take a look at my SEO and GEO analysis. I check both and tell you concretely what to tackle first.