Clients increasingly ask how to show up when someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI for a recommendation. The industry has invented acronyms for the answer, AEO and GEO among them. The platforms' own documentation is plainer.
What Google says
- There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimisation is needed. A page must be indexed and eligible to show with a snippet.
- You do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup.
- Google's AI optimisation guide, added in May 2026, says optimising for generative AI search is still SEO. It stresses content that is not a commodity, such as a unique point of view or first-hand reviews, and warns that seeking inauthentic mentions is not as helpful as it might seem.
- Google Search ignores llms.txt. Keeping one neither harms nor helps.
- FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search from 7 May 2026, so FAQ markup is no route into AI answers.
What OpenAI says
- ChatGPT search uses its own crawler, OAI-SearchBot. Allow it in robots.txt if you want to appear in search answers. Changes take about 24 hours.
- GPTBot is the training crawler. Blocking it does not remove you from ChatGPT search.
- ChatGPT-User handles visits a person triggers, and does not decide inclusion.
- OpenAI says placement is not guaranteed, and ChatGPT adds utm_source=chatgpt.com to the links it sends.
- ChatGPT sometimes partners with other search providers. OpenAI does not say it simply uses Bing.
Bing, Copilot and Perplexity
- Bing's guidelines now cover Copilot and its grounding results, and say SEO fundamentals apply. IndexNow and sitemaps help pages get discovered.
- PerplexityBot respects robots.txt and is not used for training. Perplexity's user-triggered agent generally ignores robots.txt, because a person asked for the page.
What actually helps
- Be crawlable and indexed. Check robots.txt allows Googlebot, Bingbot, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot unless you have a reason to block one.
- Publish what others cannot: original data, first-hand reviews, clear prices and specifications, and an honest point of view.
- Keep your facts consistent across your own site and the profiles that describe you.
- Do not buy mentions. Google warns specifically against inauthentic ones.
Measuring it
- In GA4, the default AI Assistant channel groups referrals from ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek, Copilot and Grok.
- Clicks from Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode count as Organic Search, and in Search Console they sit inside the Web search type.
- Look for utm_source=chatgpt.com in your landing page reports.
How big is it in the Gulf?
Smaller than the noise suggests, for now. Statcounter's September 2026 data puts AI chatbots at 0.43% of referral traffic to UAE websites, against 85.97% from search and 13.6% from social, with Saudi Arabia at a similar 0.41%. Among chatbots, ChatGPT sent 81% of UAE referrals and Gemini 13%. These figures measure traffic to sites using Statcounter, not how many people use AI search.
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