--- title: "GEO Self-Care: What You Can Do Yourself for Your Visibility in AI Answers · artheris" description: "Six things every brand can do itself for its visibility in AI answers, and when. With what we measured ourselves along the way, and what we do not claim." canonical: "https://artheris.de/en/blog/geo-self-care" lang: "en" alternate: "https://artheris.de/blog/geo-self-care" describedby: "/llms.txt" --- [HTML version](https://artheris.de/en/blog/geo-self-care) # GEO Self-Care: What You Can Do Yourself for Your Visibility in AI Answers *September 13, 2026 · Dominik Behrens, CTO* ### What can a company do itself so that AI assistants like ChatGPT or Perplexity recommend it? Not yet measured. We will add how ChatGPT and Perplexity answer this question here, with a date. I just got back from a week at the Baltic Sea. Saturday evening, the laptop is open, and for the first time in weeks I am sitting at our own website instead of the software behind it. The past weeks belonged to the product, the customer runs, the planning. The page that is supposed to explain to people what we do sat still in the meantime. The classic case of the cobbler's children. What I am about to do tonight is actually what we otherwise do for customers: get the site into shape so AI systems can find it, read it, and cite it. And since I am going through every step anyway, I am writing it down here. Not as a how-to guide, but as a list of what to do and when. Your developer knows the how, or you ask us. First, an honest foundation, so nobody starts with the wrong expectations. ## The number that puts everything in perspective AI answers fluctuate. In late 2025, SparkToro ran 2,961 queries against three AI assistants and published the results in January 2026: for an identical question, the same brand list came back in under one percent of cases. Anyone who sells you a fixed "position in ChatGPT" is selling you a number that looks different on the next call. What can be measured is something else: whether your brand shows up at all in answers to purchase-relevant questions, how often compared to competitors, and which sources the systems cite while doing so. A share in a sample, not a position. Everything that follows stays within that boundary. ## Tonight: Ask the way your customers ask The first step costs nothing and takes ten minutes. Open a new chat and ask the way someone who does not know you yet would ask: for a provider of what you sell, in the market where you sell it. Three to five questions, in ChatGPT and in Perplexity. You will then see three things: whether you show up, who shows up instead, and which pages are named as sources. That is your starting point. Note the date. ## Tonight: Watch for whether a source is given A pattern we noticed in a customer conversation: as long as the answer comes from the model's memory, no source is given underneath it. Sources only appear once the system triggers a web search. That is exactly where your lever is. What a model learned during training, you cannot change. What it finds during a search, you can. That is why our measurements only count answers that triggered a web search. Everything else is memory, and nobody can edit that. ## This week: Let the right crawlers in The systems that cite sources send their own crawlers. They are called GPTBot and OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot and Claude-User, PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, Google-Extended. Many sites block them without knowing it, because a firewall or a plugin blanket-blocks anything that looks like a bot. Have someone check whether these names get through on your site. We measured exactly this case with our own web check: pages that a human sees without any problem answered the machine with a block page. Whoever does not get in does not get cited. ## This week: State who you are, in a file There are two things a machine can read without interpreting your page. An llms.txt under your domain: a heading, a short paragraph on what you do, then facts and links, no marketing. And an Organization schema in the head of your page: name, location, founders, contact, services. Whatever is in there has to also appear on the visible page. Both take an hour to build. We only caught up on both for artheris.de last week, with person entries for both founders. It was overdue. ## Before your next relaunch: Give machines Markdown This is something we have built for artheris.de ourselves. Cloudflare introduced a feature that lets a client request the Markdown version of a page on demand, instead of HTML. In February 2026, Cloudflare put the savings, using one of its own blog posts as an example, at around 80 percent fewer tokens. Coding agents like Claude Code already ask for pages this way today. Why that matters: an agent that can read your page for a fifth of the effort is more likely to read it in full, and it reads the facts instead of the navigation. For artheris.de, this exists as a second version of the same address, for example /index.md for the home page. If your site sits behind Cloudflare, it is a toggle. If not, it is an afternoon for your developer. ## From now on, always: Date everything Every question you ask gets a date, the exact wording, the system, and the answer. A screenshot in a folder is enough at the start. In three months you will want to know whether anything has moved, and without a date and exact wording you are comparing two things that have nothing to do with each other. And do not draw a line from a single run. In our product, we deliberately do not show a trend curve from one data point, because a horizontal line drawn from a single measurement claims a stability that was never measured. ## What I am not claiming That your brand will be recommended after these steps. Nobody can promise that, because the systems do not belong to any of us. What I am claiming: after this, the systems can find you, read you, and cite you. Before, they often could not. The rest is measuring, changing, remeasuring, with a date. ## And now, the self-promotion There is no getting around this part, and I will keep it short. You do not have to build two of the steps above yourself. The starting point, that is, the question of whether your brand shows up in AI answers, runs on artheris.de as a basic check with no email required: enter your domain, choose a market, pick a buyer question, wait half a minute. The same run we do for customers, across ChatGPT and Perplexity, as a dated sample. And anyone who requests the report on top of that gets a ready-made change proposal for their site delivered with it, in the simplest case the llms.txt, ready to review and add. [Start the basic check](https://artheris.de/en) If you get stuck rebuilding any of this, write to me: mail@artheris.de. **Author:** Dominik Behrens, CTO **E-Mail:** mail@artheris.de