Your clients are looking for a tradesperson on ChatGPT. Are you in the answer?

A year ago, a client looking for a plumber in Metz typed "plumber Metz" into Google and looked at the first three results. Today, some of those same clients open ChatGPT and ask: "Can you suggest a good, responsive plumber around Metz?" And the AI answers with two or three names.

The question I hear most often right now is exactly that one: "Marc, can my business show up when someone asks an AI?" The answer is yes. It even has a name, GEO, for Generative Engine Optimization, the practice of ranking inside generative engines. It's young, still moving, but the fundamentals are already clear.

This article is concrete. No hype, no promise of a guaranteed top spot, which doesn't exist. Just what genuinely works, and 5 actions you can start this week, even without being technical.

Section 01

What changed in search

For twenty years, search ran on a page of blue links. You typed words, Google showed ten results, you clicked. Generative tools break that pattern. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's Gemini and Microsoft's Copilot no longer return a list, they give a written answer, often with one or two named recommendations.

The habit is spreading fast. People are getting used to asking their question in plain language: "a good roofer near Nancy who works with zinc", "a florist in Colmar open on Sundays", "an osteopath in Strasbourg who treats babies". The AI draws on what it knows of the web to answer.

The key point: these tools don't only rely on their training memory. Most of them fetch live pages at the moment of answering, through built-in web search. Which means a clear, up-to-date, machine-readable site has a real shot at being cited, even if it's recent.

Being visible in an AI isn't some magic trick reserved for big companies. It's largely the natural extension of a well-built site and a well-kept Google listing.

Section 02

How an AI decides who to recommend

An AI has no commercial conscience. It doesn't like you, it doesn't dislike you. It assembles an answer from sources it judges reliable and easy to understand. Three criteria stand out when you watch what gets cited.

Factual clarity. An AI loves self-contained facts: a trade, a town, an opening time, a price, a service area, written in plain sight. A sentence like "Electrician in Mulhouse, callouts within a 25 km radius, free quote within 48 hours" is a hundred times more usable than a vague slogan like "your trusted partner for all your projects".

Consistency across sources. If your name, address and phone number are identical on your site, your Google listing and the directories, the machine cross-checks and gains confidence. If everything contradicts itself, it gets cautious and moves on to a cleaner competitor.

Technical readability. A fast, clean site whose content lives in the page text rather than hidden in an image or a heavy script is easy to read. It's the exact same hygiene that serves classic Google ranking. The good news: you're not working for two different audiences. What Google likes, AIs like too.

Action 01

Polish your Google listing, it's the foundation

Your Google Business Profile is one of the most cited sources for local queries, because it's structured and verified. If it's incomplete or neglected, you start with a handicap.

This week, concretely: fill in your exact business category, your real opening hours, your service area, add five to ten recent photos of real work, and reply to existing reviews. A living listing with recent reviews carries far more weight than one frozen for two years. I wrote a full guide on the subject if you want to go deeper.

Action 02

Write your site in factual sentences

This is the most rewarding action and it costs nothing. Reread your homepage and ask yourself: if I copy this sentence and read it out of context, does it say anything precise?

"We put our expertise at the service of your satisfaction" says nothing usable. "Mason in Strasbourg since 2014, specialised in facade renovation and stone walls, free quote" says everything: the trade, the town, the experience, the speciality. That's the kind of sentence an AI can lift almost word for word into its answer.

The rule I apply on every site I build: at least one concrete fact every 150 to 200 words. A date, a number, a neighbourhood name, a price, a certification. The denser your text is in facts, the more quotable it is. Empty copy, on the other hand, never gets reused, not by Google and not by an AI.

Action 03

Let the AI bots into your site

Every site has a small, quiet file, the robots.txt, that tells bots what they're allowed to read. The catch is that quite a few sites block AI bots by default, sometimes without knowing, because a theme or a security plugin decided it for you.

The bots to allow if you want to be visible: GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT, ClaudeBot for Claude, PerplexityBot for Perplexity, Google-Extended for Google's AI side. If you block them, you make yourself invisible to those tools, full stop. It's exactly like locking your shop door and wondering why nobody walks in.

If you don't know where to look, ask whoever manages your site, or type your address followed by /robots.txt in your browser to see what's in there. On the sites I deliver, these bots are allowed by default, and the unwanted scrapers are blocked.

Action 04

Describe your business in structured data

Structured data is a standardised format (it's called Schema.org) that lets you describe your business in a language machines understand without ambiguity: you're a local business, here's your name, your address, your hours, your average rating, your services.

It's invisible to the human visitor, but it's gold for a machine. Instead of guessing that "13 rue des Peupliers" is an address, it knows it formally. It removes ambiguity, and an AI that doesn't doubt your information cites you more readily.

It's the most technical of the five, and the only one that really calls for a helping hand. If your site has no structured data today, which is often the case for homemade sites or old themes, this is the addition that pays off most for the least visible effort.

Action 05

Add an llms.txt file built for AIs

Here's the most recent addition. An llms.txt file is a simple text document, placed at the root of the site, that summarises for AIs who you are, what you do, your important pages and your key information. It's a kind of introduction sheet written directly for language models.

The standard is young and not every tool uses it yet. But it's trivial to set up, it can't hurt, and it puts you on the right side of the slope. When an AI tries to quickly understand your business, it finds a clean summary you wrote yourself, rather than having to piece everything together page by page.

For the curious

What I do on the technical side of every site

I'll give you the detail because I don't like black boxes, and because this is the kind of thing you should be able to have explained to you before you're billed for it.

On every site I deliver, the robots.txt file explicitly allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended, and blocks abusive scrapers. I add Schema.org structured data matched to the type of activity: LocalBusiness for a tradesperson, Person for a freelancer, FAQPage on frequently-asked-questions pages. I generate two files for AIs, a short llms.txt listing the key pages and a fuller llms-full.txt with the detail of each service.

I also use speakable markup, which flags the parts of a page meant to be read aloud by a voice assistant, such as an answer to a frequent question. And I keep a high Lighthouse score on performance, because a fast site is also a site a machine reads all the way through without giving up.

None of this is magic. It's technical hygiene applied seriously. And that's exactly what makes the difference between a site an AI cites and a site it ignores.

The right instinct: a readable site, not a gadget race

I'll close on a word of caution. GEO is young, and as with every new thing, some providers will sell you "AI visibility packs" for 2,000 euros that are nothing more than what I just described. Don't fall for it. Showing up in an AI isn't a miracle product, it's the natural result of a clean, factual, machine-readable site.

If your site already ticks the right boxes for Google, you're 80% of the way to the AIs. The rest is a few well-placed technical additions. Do the first two actions yourself this week, and for the other three, surround yourself with someone who explains what they're doing, not someone who sells you mystery.