The short answer
Your customers in Malaysia may now see an AI answer before they ever reach your website. Google shows AI Overviews and AI Mode here, in English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil; ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot answer questions and cite a handful of pages. Generative engine optimization is the effort to be one of those pages.
It is less new than the name suggests. Google says its AI features are built on the same core ranking and quality systems as the rest of Search: they take pages from the search index to write an answer, and they run several related searches at once to do it. A page that is not indexed, not crawlable or not useful does not become citable by being "optimised for AI". What has changed is what a page has to do well — and, in 2026, the switches and reports a site owner gets. This guide covers both, along with the claims you can now ignore.
GEO, AEO, AI SEO: one job, several names
You will see several names for it: answer engine optimization (AEO), generative engine optimization (GEO), large language model optimization (LLMO), AI search optimization and "AI SEO". There are no agreed definitions; they describe the same work from different angles. GEO comes from a 2023 research paper by a team that included Princeton researchers, AEO stresses giving the answer directly, and "AI SEO" is the everyday industry name for the same work.
The two largest search engines describe the work in similar terms:
- Google treats AEO and GEO as work to improve visibility in AI search experiences, and calls it "still SEO". In June 2026 it added a guide on evaluating third-party SEO advice, and points anyone considering an AEO or GEO service to it first.
- Bing's webmaster guidelines, rewritten in February 2026, separate the two: SEO covers a site's technical quality, clarity and accessibility; GEO is about whether content can be used to ground an AI answer and be cited in it. Bing says neither guarantees a result.
The practical test for any GEO proposal is simple: ask what it does that good SEO would not. If the answer is a special file, a special markup or a new kind of keyword, read the section on what you don't need to do.
How AI search decides what to cite
Each system works differently, but the pattern is the same: retrieve first, write second.
- Google AI Overviews and AI Mode use retrieval-augmented generation, which Google also calls grounding: pages are taken from the search index and used to write the answer. With "query fan-out", the model runs several related searches at once, so a page can be cited for a question it was never written for — if it ranks for one of the searches underneath. To be eligible, a page must be indexed, be eligible to appear as a snippet, meet Google's technical requirements and — new in 2026 — belong to a site set to "Include" in Search Console's Search generative AI setting, which is the default. Meeting all four makes a page eligible; it does not guarantee it will be shown.
- ChatGPT search depends on OpenAI's own crawler, OAI-SearchBot: sites that block it do not appear in ChatGPT search answers, though they may still show up as navigational links. OpenAI has also said that ChatGPT search draws on third-party search providers and on content supplied directly by its partners.
- Perplexity indexes sites with PerplexityBot for its search results, and says that crawler is not used to train AI models.
- Bing and Microsoft Copilot: Bing's guidelines describe GEO in terms of grounding and citation in AI answers, and recommend IndexNow so that Bing and Copilot learn about new and changed pages quickly.
Research adds one clue. The paper that coined "GEO" (published at KDD 2024) rewrote one source at a time and measured how visible it became in a generated answer. Adding citations to sources, quotations and statistics worked best — up to about 40% more visibility on the paper's word-count-and-position measure. The conditions matter. The test engine was GPT-3.5 reading the top five Google results. On Perplexity, the best gain on the same measure was about 22%. And for a source that was already ranked first, adding citations cut its visibility by about 30%, while a source ranked fifth gained 115%. Keyword stuffing scored below doing nothing at all.
What to change on your pages
Most of the work is editorial. For a typical small-business site, start here:
- Answer the question where it is asked. Put a one- or two-sentence answer directly under the heading, then the detail. Readers skim, and a direct answer is the easiest part of a page to quote.
- Publish what nobody else can. Google's guide asks for "non-commodity" content: first-hand experience and a point of view, not a restatement of what every other page already says. For a Malaysian business that usually means local specifics — the regulation that applies, the price range in ringgit, the term customers use in Malay or Chinese, the step that goes wrong in practice.
- Show your sources. Name the regulation, link the study, give the number and its date. It is what the GEO research found AI answers pick up, and it is what a careful buyer checks.
- Keep the words in the page. Text inside images, behind a click or drawn only by scripts is harder for any crawler to read. Google's guide lists crawlability, JavaScript SEO, page experience and avoiding duplicate content as the technical base.
- Make structured data describe what is visible. Google requires no schema for AI features and has no AI-specific markup; it asks only that structured data match the page. Keep using it where it earns a rich result.
- Keep business details current. Google's guide has a section on local businesses and ecommerce: keep your Business Profile complete and accurate, and your Merchant Center information too if you sell online.
- Use AI to draft if it helps, then check. Google does not penalise content for being written with AI; it acts against pages produced at scale without added value. Check the facts, titles, descriptions, structured data and image alt text before you publish.
What you don't need to do
A good share of what is sold as GEO is unnecessary. Google's guide has a "mythbusting" section; the table puts the common claims next to what the documentation says.
| You may hear | What the documentation says |
|---|---|
| "Add an llms.txt file so AI can find you." | Google Search, including its AI features, does not use llms.txt or any other special AI file or markup. Having one neither helps nor hurts your visibility there. |
| "Split your articles into small chunks for AI." | Not needed. Google says its systems understand pages that cover several topics, and there is no ideal page length. |
| "Rewrite pages for AI and cover every long-tail variation." | Not needed — AI understands synonyms and meaning. Mass-producing pages for each variation of a fanned-out query to manipulate rankings or answers counts as scaled content abuse. |
| "Get mentioned on forums and lists." | Google says manufactured mentions are less useful than people think, and its spam systems still apply. |
| "FAQ schema gets you into AI Overviews." | There is no special schema for AI features, and FAQ rich results have not been shown in Google Search at all since 7 May 2026. FAQ content on the page is still fine. |
| "Our tool shows your ranking inside Google's AI." | Google: "No third-party tool has access to our internal ranking or AI systems." AI visibility tools sample answers; their numbers are estimates. |
Crawlers and switches: who reads your site, and how to say no
AI companies run separate crawlers for search, for training, and for fetching a page when a user asks. Blocking one does not block the others.
| Company | Shows your site in its search and answers | Collects content for training | Fetches a page when a user asks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Googlebot (Search, including AI Overviews and AI Mode) | Google-Extended (a robots.txt token, not a separate crawler) | — | |
| OpenAI | OAI-SearchBot | GPTBot | ChatGPT-User |
| Perplexity | PerplexityBot | — (Perplexity says its crawler is not used for training) | Perplexity-User |
| Anthropic | Claude-SearchBot | ClaudeBot | Claude-User |
The last column does not always follow robots.txt: OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply to ChatGPT-User, and Perplexity says Perplexity-User generally ignores them. Anthropic says all three of its crawlers respect robots.txt.
What each switch does:
- To appear in ChatGPT search, allow OAI-SearchBot in robots.txt and in any firewall or CDN in front of the site; OpenAI publishes its IP ranges. You can allow it and still block GPTBot.
- To stay out of Google's AI features but keep your rankings, go to Search Console → Settings → "Search generative AI" → Exclude. Every site has had this since 31 August 2026. It removes the site from AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative features in Discover, usually within one to two days, and Google says it is not used as a ranking signal elsewhere in Search. It does not affect AI training.
- To keep content out of Gemini model training, disallow Google-Extended in robots.txt. It has no effect on Google Search, so it will not keep you out of AI Overviews.
- nosnippet and max-snippet limit how much of a page Google may use as direct input for AI Overviews and AI Mode — but they shorten your ordinary search snippets too.
- On Bing and Copilot, NOINDEX keeps a page out of Bing, Copilot and grounding results; NOCACHE limits Copilot to the URL, title and snippet.
- Blocking Googlebot takes the site out of Google Search altogether. AI features are part of Search.
If your site sits behind a firewall or a bot-protection service, check that it lets through the search crawlers you want: OpenAI and Perplexity both ask site owners to allow their published IP ranges.
How to measure it
There is no single "AI ranking" to look up, but four places hold real data:
- Search Console, Performance report. Clicks and impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode are counted in the Web search type, not shown separately. A click on a link inside an AI Overview counts as a click, and the whole AI Overview occupies one position.
- Search Console, Generative AI performance report. Available to every site since 31 August 2026. It shows impressions only — no clicks, click-through rate or queries — by page, country, date and device. Sites with too few AI impressions may not see it. Since 24 September 2026, both reports can separate text searches from image searches such as Lens and Circle to Search.
- Bing Webmaster Tools, AI Performance. In public preview since February 2026: how often your pages are cited in Copilot and Bing's AI-generated summaries, which pages, and a sample of the "grounding queries" used to find them. June 2026 added intents, topics and your share of the citations for a query. Bing's announcements do not mention click data.
- Google Analytics 4. Since 13 May 2026 the default channel grouping has an "AI Assistant" channel for visits referred by assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot. Visits from Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode still count as Organic Search.
AI search in Malaysia, and what it does to clicks
- It is here, in local languages. Google lists Malaysia among the countries with AI Overviews and AI Mode, with English, Malay, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) and Tamil among the supported languages. AI Mode was English-only when it arrived in August 2025; that is no longer the case.
- People already use AI for information. In the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, 11% of Malaysian respondents had used an AI chatbot to get news in the previous week, against 10% globally, and 18% said they trust news from AI chatbots (20% globally). The survey ran online through YouGov from mid-January to late February 2026, with 2,076 respondents in Malaysia, so it represents internet users rather than the whole population.
- Adoption is still moderate. Microsoft's AI Economy Institute estimates that 22.6% of Malaysians aged 15 to 64 used generative AI in the second quarter of 2026 (18.8% worldwide, 64.3% in Singapore). It is a model built from Microsoft's own telemetry, not a survey.
- The platforms are large. OpenAI says ChatGPT has 1.2 billion weekly users (DevDay, September 2026); Google says AI Overviews have more than 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode more than 1 billion (June 2026). Both are the companies' own figures.
What AI summaries do to clicks is still argued over. Pew Research tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025: on results pages with an AI summary, 8% of visits included a click on a traditional result, against 15% where there was none. Google disputed the method. Seer Interactive's data from 53 brands shows organic click-through on queries with an AI Overview falling to 1.3% in December 2025 and recovering to 2.4% by February 2026 — and brands cited in the AI Overview earning about 120% more organic clicks per impression than brands that were not. That last figure is a correlation, not proof of cause, but it is the point of GEO: when a summary sits above the results, being one of its sources is what still earns the click.
What GEO costs
GEO is not a budget line separate from SEO. The work is the same three things — content, technical fixes and measurement — with more weight on the content. What that costs in Malaysia, and what changes once AI search is part of the brief, is covered in How much does SEO cost in Malaysia now that AI search is in the mix?. Be wary of any proposal priced on a promise of AI citations: nobody outside Google can see how its AI chooses sources, and Bing says GEO guarantees nothing.
What to do in the next 30 days
- In Search Console, open Settings → "Search generative AI" and confirm it is set the way you want (Include is the default). Check whether the Generative AI performance report has data for your site.
- Read your robots.txt and any firewall or bot-protection settings. Decide on search crawlers and training crawlers separately: OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot affect whether you can be cited; GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended affect training.
- Add the AI Assistant channel to the GA4 report you already read each month.
- List the ten questions customers ask before they buy, and check each has a page that answers it in its first lines — in the language they search in.
- On your most important pages, add what only you can say: your process, the local rules, real numbers with their sources.
- Find the hidden text: words inside images, content that appears only after a click, pages that need scripts to show their main text.
- If your customers use Bing and Copilot, verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools and send changed pages through IndexNow. (Google does not use IndexNow.)