GEO (generative engine optimization) is about getting your site into the answers AI assistants give. Before content or links matter, the basics have to work. Here is the checklist I run on every site:
1. robots.txt: make sure you don't block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, Claude-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or Bingbot by accident.
2. Server-rendered text: open your page with JavaScript disabled. If the main text disappears, many crawlers won't see it either.
3. Indexing in Google and Bing: AI assistants lean on search indexes. ChatGPT and Copilot rely heavily on Bing, Claude uses Brave, and Brave discovers sites largely through Google and Bing. Verify in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
More and more people ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Grok for product recommendations instead of Googling. While building my own projects I noticed many sites never appear in those answers, often for boring technical reasons: AI crawlers are blocked, pages aren't indexed in the search engines these assistants rely on, or there's simply no page that clearly answers the buyer's question.
So I'm building AURA GEO (aurageo.io). You connect a site once, and an agent checks how AI assistants see it, fixes the technical side (robots, sitemap, llms.txt, indexing in Google, Bing and Brave), works through a verified step-by-step plan, and shows how many visitors actually come from each AI assistant. It also works over MCP, so you can drive it from Claude or Cursor.
I m Sarah, the founder of Operato AI, the self-serve AI Visibility platform. In 2014 I joined AppsFlyer as an early employee and spent 10 years there, building the French market and helping marketing teams measure where their customers actually came from.
One lesson stuck with me: every time a new acquisition channel appears, the companies that measure it first are the ones that win it. Mobile apps were that channel in 2014.
This year I noticed the next one. Buyers are asking ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity what s the best tool for X? instead of Googling. The assistant answers with 3 or 4 names, and if you re not one of them, you never even get the visit. Yet most companies have no idea what those answers say about them.
So I built Operato AI. Every week it asks the assistants the questions your buyers ask, then shows how often you re named, who gets recommended instead, which websites the assistants trust, and what to fix first. In English and French
