Step 1: Confirm AI crawlers can actually reach your site
Before anything else, verify your robots.txt file explicitly allows GPTBot (OpenAI), ClaudeBot (Anthropic), PerplexityBot and Google-Extended — a page an AI crawler can't fetch can never be cited, regardless of how well-written the content is. This is the single most common, and most embarrassing, GEO failure: a genuinely excellent page sitting behind an unintentional crawler block nobody noticed. Check yours free with the AI visibility checker.
Step 2: Give AI crawlers a curated shortlist
An llms.txt file at your site's root points AI crawlers to your most important, citable pages in a format built for AI consumption. Most competing sites in most Malaysian categories don't have one yet — see our llms.txt explainer and build one free with the llms.txt generator.
Step 3: Add structured schema data
Organization, Service, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList schema make your content machine-parseable — an AI model can confirm what your business is, what it offers, and what questions it directly answers far more reliably from structured data than from parsing prose alone. This is also standard technical SEO practice, so building it serves both disciplines at once.
Step 4: Put a direct, extractable answer near the top of key pages
An AI model typically quotes or paraphrases a short passage rather than reading and synthesising an entire page. A hedged, buried, or heavily qualified answer is far less likely to get extracted than a direct statement with a specific figure or fact near the top of the page — the "quick answer" box format used throughout this site exists specifically for this reason.
Step 5: Build genuine third-party citations
Directory listings, press mentions, community forum references and other third-party sources that mention your business function as a trust signal to an AI model's retrieval step, similar to how backlinks function for traditional search ranking. A business that only exists on its own website, with zero third-party footprint, gives an AI model less independent confirmation to weigh when deciding whether to recommend it.
Step 6: Measure whether it's actually working
Run a consistent set of real commercial queries against ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity on a recurring basis, tracking whether your business is mentioned, where in the answer, and what sources get cited alongside you. This is the only way to know whether the above steps are producing results, rather than assuming they are.
What we do differently in client accounts
We run this exact checklist as one system alongside a client's existing SEO work — see our GEO service for how it's scoped as a layer on an SEO retainer rather than a separate standalone product.