How do you show up in AI answers?
By the How Two Cut team · 21 October 2026 · 5 min read
The short answer. Write pages that answer real questions in plain words, keep that text in the page itself rather than drawn in by a script, back your claims with sources, and let AI crawlers in. Google says there is no special trick for its AI answers: good search basics are the foundation.
Why does this matter now?
Because people are getting answers without clicking. Pew Research followed 900 US adults in March 2025. On visits where Google showed an AI summary, people clicked a regular result link 8% of the time, against 15% when there was no summary. They clicked a link inside the summary on 1% of visits, and ended their browsing session after 26% of visits with a summary, against 16% without. This is US data, and Google's design keeps changing, but the direction is clear. Being the page that gets quoted matters more, and a click is harder to win.
What is GEO?
GEO, short for generative engine optimisation, is the work of making your content easy for AI tools to find, understand and quote. That includes ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. The term comes from a 2024 research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues. It sits on top of good SEO. It does not replace it.
What does Google say?
Google's guidance on AI features is short and clear:
- A page must be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet. There are no additional technical requirements.
- No special optimisation is needed: no new markup, no "AI text" files, no special structured data.
- The foundations are the usual ones: helpful, people-first content, pages search engines are allowed to crawl, links between your own pages, a good page experience, and important content as real text.
- If you use structured data, it must match the visible text on the page.
- Following all of this does not guarantee a page will be shown.
- Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode appears in Search Console, under the Web search type.
What did the research find?
A research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues tested ways of rewriting content to be quoted more often by AI answer engines. Adding statistics, adding quotations and citing sources were among the strongest changes, raising visibility by up to about 40% in the authors' tests. Keyword stuffing scored below doing nothing at all.
This was a controlled experiment, not a promise for any one site. The lesson holds up anyway: real facts, named sources and plain answers beat tricks.
What can AI tools actually see?
Vercel's December 2024 analysis found that OpenAI's GPTBot, Anthropic's ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot fetched pages but did not run JavaScript. Google's Gemini, which uses Google's own crawling, was the exception. So text that only appears after a script runs may be invisible to many AI tools. Keep the words that matter in the page itself.
Should you let AI crawlers in?
Anthropic has three separate crawlers, and all follow robots.txt: ClaudeBot collects training data, Claude-SearchBot indexes content for search results, and Claude-User fetches a page when someone asks Claude a question. Anthropic warns that blocking the search bot may reduce your visibility in AI search results. Other AI companies run similar bots.
The practical point: decide on training and on search separately, and check your robots.txt file, instead of blocking everything by default.
A simple checklist
- Answer the questions your customers actually ask, near the top of the page
- Put the text in the page itself, not in a script
- Use clear headings, short paragraphs and plain words
- Add real facts: numbers, named sources and quotes where you have them
- Keep your name, services and contact details the same everywhere
- Keep pages up to date, and redirect old addresses rather than letting them disappear
- Check your robots.txt file and your sitemap
- Watch the Web report in Search Console to see traffic from Google's AI features
Can we just let AI write our pages?
You can use AI to help, but not to replace the thinking. Google's guidance says AI can be useful for research and for adding structure to original content. It also says that producing many pages without adding value may break its spam rules, and that every word should be fact-checked, including titles, descriptions and image descriptions.
There are two more reasons for care. AI gets things wrong: in the EBU and BBC study of more than 3,000 answers to news questions, 45% had at least one significant issue, and 31% had missing or misleading sources. And AI-written text can sound alike: in a 2024 study of 300 writers, stories written with AI ideas were 10.7% more similar to each other. The GEO research points the other way. What helps is real statistics, quotations and cited sources, and a person on your team has to supply those.
A practical step: ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google the questions your customers ask, and see what they say about you. If something is wrong, fix the page it came from.
Common questions
Is GEO different from SEO?
Mostly it builds on it. Search engines and AI tools both reward clear, accurate, well-structured pages. GEO adds extra care about how directly a page answers a question.
Do we need a special file for AI tools?
Google says no new machine-readable or "AI text" files are needed for its AI features. Clear pages come first.
Can anyone guarantee we will appear in AI answers?
No. Google says that following best practice does not guarantee a page is shown, and AI answers change from question to question.
How long before it works?
Changes are picked up when pages are next visited, which can take days or weeks. We would rather give you a clear plan than promise a date.
Sources
The figures and claims above come from these pages, as we found them in October 2026.
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