Whitepaper
GEO Guide for SMEs
ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews now answer search queries directly, without users clicking through to your website. This guide shows small and mid-sized businesses, step by step, how to become visible in AI answers and get cited as a source.
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What you'll take away
Get cited in AI answers
Understand how ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews pick their sources, and which signals decide whether your brand gets mentioned or stays invisible.
The seven levers, in the right order
From crawler access and SSR through schema and a Wikidata entity to citable chunks and brand mentions, laid out as a pyramid from the bottom up.
A roadmap in four phases
Audit › Foundations › Content › Off-Page in 10–14 weeks, each phase with a measurable gate, from bot hits to citation share.
10-point self-check
Check your own domain: JS test, robots.txt, schema, Wikidata entity, mentions. Every “no” is something to fix.
What GEO Guide for SMEs is about
What it's about
Why GEO matters now
AI search is measurably eating into traffic, in Germany too. Google AI Overviews appear for around 20 % of all German search queries and cut the click-through rate for position 1 from 27 % to 11 % (SISTRIX 02/2026, 100 million keywords). SEO optimises for rankings, GEO for being cited in the AI answer: different KPIs, different levers.
The guide turns this shift into concrete steps for SMEs: the seven levers, from crawler access through schema and a Wikidata entity to brand mentions, a 10–14-week roadmap and a 10-point self-check for your own domain. It also takes a clear position on llms.txt (as of May 2026: no measurable effect). If you'd rather not pull the levers on your own, our GEO agency can help.
What to expect
14 pages: market data from Bitkom, Eurostat, ARD/ZDF, SISTRIX and Ahrefs, the rules of the game at ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google, the seven levers in the right order, a mini case study from our own practice and the 10-point audit to tick off. Every figure comes with a named, dated source.