How to show up when customers ask ChatGPT who to hire

“Best collision shop near Surrey that handles ICBC claims?” Five years ago that question went into Google and returned ten blue links. Today it increasingly goes to ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview — and comes back as a paragraph naming two or three businesses. Everyone else doesn’t lose the click; they never existed.

Getting named is a discipline now called generative engine optimization (GEO). Most of it is unglamorous and absolutely doable. The checklist, in the order we run it:

1. Let the AI crawlers in

Many sites block GPTBot, PerplexityBot, and ClaudeBot in robots.txt without knowing it — often a leftover from a 2023-era “block AI” plugin default. If the engines can’t read you, nothing else on this list matters. Explicitly allow them.

2. Structured data everywhere

LocalBusiness schema with your service area, Service schema per offering, FAQPage schema on real questions. Machines quote what they can parse with confidence. The overlap between AI-cited sources and top-10 Google rankings has collapsed — being citable is now a separate craft from ranking.

3. Answer-shaped content

AI engines lift answers, not slogans. A page that plainly answers “what does a fence cost in Surrey?” or “do you work with ICBC claims?” in two crisp sentences is dramatically more quotable than a page of brand adjectives. FAQ sections are the highest-return structural element per hour invested.

4. llms.txt

A plain-text summary of who you are, what you do, and where — built for machine readers, sitting at yourdomain.com/llms.txt. New standard, trivial effort. This site has one; most of your competitors won’t for another year or two.

5. Third-party mentions — the heavy lever

AI engines weight what others say about you above what you say about yourself. Google Business Profile (with steady reviews), local press, supplier and association pages, genuine directories. One real mention in a “best fencing contractors in Surrey” roundup beats a thousand words on your own site.

What results look like

First citations can show up within days of fixing the foundations; consistent visibility takes two to four months of accumulating mentions. The honest test: ask the engines your own customers’ questions, screenshot the answers, fix the gaps, ask again next month. That before/after screenshot is the entire report — no vanity metrics required.