Ask ChatGPT who can help with your problem in your town, and there is a fair chance it names three competitors and not you. When I look at why, the cause is rarely anything to do with AI. It is a site with the services locked in an image, no structured data, pages Google has never indexed, or a robots file blocking the crawlers the business wants to be read by. AI tools just make an old visibility problem easier to see.
Answer engine optimisation (AEO), generative engine optimisation (GEO) and LLM SEO are three names for the same job: making your business clear, citable and accurate when someone asks an AI tool such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot or Google AI Overviews who can help with their problem. For a small UK site, that is mostly good technical SEO, plus pages that answer real questions in plain English, plus facts a model can quote without inventing anything.
You cannot force a citation. You can make yourself the easy choice.
How AI tools decide who to mention
The details differ between tools, but the pattern is consistent enough to act on:
- They have to be able to reach you. ChatGPT search and Copilot lean heavily on Bing's index. Google AI Overviews draw on Google's. Perplexity runs its own crawler as well as using search results. If you are not indexed, you are not in the running.
- They prefer clear, self-contained statements. A paragraph that says who you are, what you do, where, and for whom is easy to quote. A slogan is not.
- They cross-check. Consistent names, addresses, services and descriptions across your site, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories make you a safer thing to repeat.
- They favour first-hand evidence. Case studies with a problem, what was done and what changed give a model something concrete to reference.
What to change on your site
1. Let the right crawlers read you
- Public service, about and contact pages should not be noindexed unless you have a reason.
- Robots rules should not block the search and AI crawlers you want to be cited by. Blocking them while hoping to be quoted is contradictory.
- Important facts should live in HTML text, not only in images, PDFs or scripts.
- Submit your sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Bing matters more than most people assume, because it feeds ChatGPT search and Copilot.
2. Put the facts in plain text
Services, location, who you help, prices where you can publish them, and how to contact you. Say them in sentences on the pages where they belong, not only in the footer. If you work locally, name the town. "Based in the South West" is much harder for a model to use than "based in Clevedon, North Somerset".
3. Make schema match the page
Structured data does not guarantee a mention. It reduces ambiguity. Organisation, Person, Service, Breadcrumb and FAQ markup help machines connect the same business across pages. Validate it, and keep it consistent with the visible copy. Schema that claims things the page does not say is worse than none.
4. Write one clear answer per important page
AI systems favour paragraphs they can lift whole:
- State the definition or claim in one or two sentences.
- Follow with who it is for and what to do next.
- Use a real example: a live URL, a case study, a change you made.
- Avoid filler, and do not hedge every claim into nothing.
Example shape: "Answer engine optimisation is the work of making your business clear, citable and accurate in AI answers. For a small UK marketing site, that means accurate facts, valid schema, indexable pages and content that answers one question well."
5. Show your working
Case studies, before and after numbers, and notes from real projects are hard for competitors to copy and easy for AI tools to cite. Thin "AI visibility" posts with no first-hand work are the opposite.
6. Recheck after every launch
Migrations and redesigns break citation sources the same way they break classic SEO. Confirm the pages you want cited still return a 200, still carry the right canonical, and still sit in the sitemap.
What I changed on 4dservices.co.uk
This site started as a thin single page with no structured data and little chance of being quoted. Over the rebuild I:
- Added JSON-LD for WebSite, WebPage, ProfessionalService, Person, Service and BreadcrumbList, so machines can see who I am and what I offer.
- Built separate service pages, case studies and legal pages, each with a unique title, description and canonical.
- Added FAQs to every service page, written as direct answers rather than sales copy.
- Fixed the 404 page so it has its own metadata and does not pretend to be the homepage.
- Redirected www to the apex domain so canonicals and links stay clear.
- Left AI crawlers able to read public content.
- Named the location properly, and published prices where I have them, starting with SEO audits from £950 + VAT.
The honest before and after
Here is where that left things on 25/09/2026, when I ran a proper review of my own site in Search Console:
- 34 URLs in the sitemap, and only 1 indexed by Google.
- The sitemap was referenced in robots.txt but had never been submitted in Search Console.
- Every query the site appeared for was someone looking for a different business with "4D" in its name.
In other words, all of the on-page work above was invisible, because Google had not been told the pages existed. That is the most common gap I see on small sites, and no amount of AEO fixes it. The fix is unglamorous: submit the sitemap, request indexing for the key pages, set up Bing Webmaster Tools, and link to the site from places search engines already crawl.
I will update this post with the after numbers once Google and Bing have caught up, including which pages start appearing for non-brand searches and whether any AI tools begin to cite the site. If it works, that is proof. If it does not, that is useful too.
What to ignore
- Chasing every new acronym as if it were a separate product. AEO, GEO and LLM SEO are the same work.
- Tools that promise ChatGPT rankings without fixing your own indexing, URLs and content.
- Publishing a burst of thin posts to "train the models". One useful page beats ten generic ones.
- Expecting AI visibility work to rescue a site that still cannot be crawled or updated.
A short checklist
- Sitemap submitted in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Key pages indexed and returning 200 with the right canonical.
- AI and search crawlers allowed in robots.txt.
- Services, location and contact facts in plain text, matched by schema.
- One clear answer near the top of each important page.
- At least one case study or first-hand example per service.
- Consistent business details on Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and key directories.
- Recheck after every redesign or migration.
If you want to know how your business currently appears in Google, ChatGPT and AI Overviews, and what to fix first, that is the job of AI search optimisation. If the problem is more basic, start with an SEO audit.
