Traditional SEO targets search engines that return ranked lists of links. AI answer engines work differently: they synthesise information from multiple sources and present a direct answer, sometimes citing the sources they used. GEO is about being one of those cited sources.
GEO has two layers:
- Access: AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended) must be permitted in
robots.txt. A site that blocks these bots is entirely invisible to AI answer engines. - Readability: Content must be well-structured, factually clear, and machine-parsable. An
llms.txtfile at the root can provide AI engines with a curated summary of the site's purpose, key pages, and authoritative content.
What SearchVitals checks: The GEO / AI Visibility module audits whether AI crawlers are permitted or blocked in robots.txt and whether a valid llms.txt file is present and correctly formatted.