AI Search Optimisation: How to Get Your Website Cited by AI

The search result is no longer a list of linksFor twenty years, ranking on Google meant one thing: appearing in a list of ten blue links and hoping so...

The search result is no longer a list of links

For twenty years, ranking on Google meant one thing: appearing in a list of ten blue links and hoping someone clicked. That model is fading. When a search engine answers the question itself, the click never happens, and the business that would have received the visit gets nothing. This is the shift that AI search optimisation, often called GEO or generative engine optimisation, is trying to address.

In practice, it means preparing your website so that AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI-generated overviews can read, extract and quote your content when someone asks about what you sell. It is not a replacement for classic SEO, and anyone selling it as one is overselling. It is what you do once the foundations are already in place.

Why this matters for SMEs in Catalonia and Spain

Search behaviour has changed faster than most small businesses realise. A significant and growing share of searches on Google across the European Union now end without a click at all, and when an AI-generated overview appears at the top of the page, the site in first position tends to lose a substantial portion of the traffic it used to receive. Google rolled out these AI overviews in Spain during 2025, so this is no longer a distant trend.

For a pyme in Lleida, Barcelona, Tarragona or Girona, the practical consequence is simple. If a potential customer asks an AI assistant for a supplier, a service or a comparison, and your website is not among the sources that assistant can read, you are invisible in that conversation. You have not lost a ranking. You have lost the entire interaction.

What actually decides whether an AI cites you

No platform publishes its full criteria, so treat any agency claiming to know the exact formula with caution, including us. What is documented and observable comes down to a few things.

Access. If your site blocks the crawlers these systems use, nothing else matters. This happens more often than you would expect, usually after installing a security plugin or firewall without checking what it lets through.
Extractability. An AI system does not read your page from top to bottom like a person. It pulls fragments and reassembles them. A page that answers one specific question directly is far easier to quote than the same information spread across ten paragraphs.
Credibility signals. Google summarises what it values in publishers as experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust. For a small business, this translates into something straightforward: content written from real experience and signed by a named person carries more weight than anonymous text anyone could have produced.

The one piece of hard evidence worth knowing

Almost everything published about AI search optimisation comes from companies selling it. There is one exception. A research team presented at the KDD conference in 2024 the work that coined the term GEO, testing different ways of writing the same content and measuring which version got cited more often. Their finding was that these techniques can raise visibility in generated answers considerably, with the strongest results coming from how the text is supported rather than how it is structured.

The techniques that performed best were citing external sources, adding quotations from credible voices and including statistics with attribution. In other words, content that shows its working gets picked up more than content that simply asserts.

What this means for your website build

This is where web development and search visibility stop being separate conversations. A site built for AI citation is a site built properly: fast, cleanly structured, secure and easy for both people and machines to parse.

If you are planning a new website or rebuilding an old one, these are the decisions that matter most.

Speed and technical health. Slow pages get crawled less and read less. Performance is not a vanity metric, it is a precondition.
Clean semantic structure. Clear headings, short paragraphs and direct answers to real questions give AI systems something to extract.
Open access for legitimate crawlers. Your security setup should protect you without shutting out the systems that could be sending you visibility.
Content that reflects genuine expertise. Case studies, technical explanations and named authorship all reinforce the trust signals that both Google and AI assistants rely on.
GDPR-compliant foundations. For any business operating in Spain, data handling is not optional, and it affects how your site can be built and measured.

Measure citations and visits separately

One trap is assuming that being cited by an AI produces traffic. Often it does not, at least not directly. A mention inside a generated answer can build recognition without generating a single visit, and a visit can arrive from an AI tool with no clear attribution in your analytics. Track both, and do not expect one to explain the other.

For most SMEs in Catalonia, the sensible approach is to get the fundamentals right first. A professional website, developed to measure or on WordPress, optimised for SEO, speed and security, gives you the base that both classic search and AI search depend on. Without that base, no amount of AI-specific tinkering will compensate.

If you want to know where your current site stands, the honest starting point is a technical review: what loads, what is blocked, what can be read and what cannot. That is the conversation worth having before anyone promises you visibility inside an AI answer.

Put these ideas into practice

Talk to ALMC about a solution for your business. Explore your options or contact our team.

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