Generative engine optimization: how to get ChatGPT to recommend your business in Spain

Customers are already coming from ChatGPT. We checked

Not long ago, a visitor landed on our SunClub Business directory straight from ChatGPT. Six seconds later they clicked “Add your business”. That is how the Spanish circus Gran Circo Monumental got its page in the directory. We had not shown them any ads or invited them. They found us on their own, through an AI chatbot.

It was not a one-off. Over two weeks, ChatGPT sent 25 people to the magazine’s website and the SunClub directory. For comparison, Google sent 298 over the same period.

The more telling number is this one: of the seven Spanish-speaking companies that applied to join the directory on their own in those two weeks, four found us through ChatGPT.

The numbers are still small, of course. But they show that AI assistants have already become one more source of customers, and it pays to keep an eye on them.

What generative engine optimization is, and why SEO alone is no longer enough

People used to type a query into Google, open a few websites, compare them and pick a company. Now more and more of them ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot or Perplexity instead, and get a ready-made answer with company names and a suggestion of whom to call.

That is a big shift for any business. You can have a good-looking website, an active Instagram and fresh posts, and still barely show up in AI answers.

GEO (generative engine optimization) means making the information about your company open and easy for AI search to understand. It sits on top of regular SEO, so you need both.

There is a catch, though: ChatGPT has no fixed ranking of the best companies. Its answer depends on the question, on which pages it can access and on plenty of other factors.

So the realistic goal is more modest than “winning a permanent spot in the answer”: make sure the AI can find you and has good reasons to recommend you.

How to get your business recommended by ChatGPT: six steps

1. Make sure AI crawlers can see your website

You can spend years investing in your website, writing articles and keeping your details up to date. Yet some sites are closed to the crawlers that collect pages for AI search, and their owners have no idea. It usually comes down to hosting settings or bot protection that keeps out the crawlers of ChatGPT and other services.

What to do: have the site checked and make sure it is open to the search engines and AI services that matter to you. This is a job for a technical SEO specialist who understands how search works today.

2. Describe your business so AI knows who you are right for

Say someone asks ChatGPT: “Find a family therapist in Valencia who sees clients in person and speaks English.” Meanwhile, the therapist’s website says: “I help you find harmony, unlock your potential and reconnect with yourself.” Lovely. But which city are they in? Which languages do they work in? Do they see families? Do they offer face-to-face sessions? It is hard for an AI to recommend someone when it cannot find answers to questions that basic.

What to do: describe clearly what your company does, your services, who you work with, the towns you cover, the languages you speak and anything else that matters. A couple of keywords will not cut it. The information has to be laid out so that a search engine understands who your business is for and in which situations.

3. Keep your business details identical everywhere

Picture this: your website lists one phone number, Google another, and an old directory still shows the office you moved out of years ago.

For a customer that is annoying. For search engines it is conflicting data.

The harder it is to verify which of your details are correct, the less likely these services are to put them in an answer.

What to do: go through every platform where your business appears and make the details match. That means more than your website and Google profile: maps, business directories, platforms for professionals and anywhere else a search engine might pull information from. For local SEO in Spain, an exact pin on the map and the same details in every language count for a lot.

4. Get others talking about you: articles, directories, reviews

Compare two pictures. In the first, a company says on its own website: “We are highly experienced professionals.” In the second, industry media publish articles and interviews about it, and it has pages in independent business directories. In the second case there are more outside places where you can learn about the company and check what is being said about it.

What to do: build your reputation online through good coverage, listings in relevant directories, reviews and mentions by experts. The number of mentions matters less than what they say, whether they are true and whether search engines can read them. That is why media presence is gradually becoming part of AI search optimization.

5. Optimize your site for AI: schema markup and real answers

A person opens your page and sees photos, a list of services, prices and contact details.

Search engines read it differently. Beyond the text, they need its structure: where the services are, where the address is, what applies to the whole company and what to a single offer. There are tools for this, including schema.org markup in the page code. The other half is answering the questions customers actually ask. For a cleaning company, that might be after-builders cleaning, looking after holiday lets or upholstery cleaning.

What to do: review the site structure, add markup and write your copy around the way people really phrase questions in search engines and to AI assistants. Here a technical specialist and an SEO writer work together.

6. Set up indexing in Google and Bing, then track the results

Even if your site is in good shape and full of useful content, you still need to confirm that search engines are actually finding its pages.

Google and Bing both have tools for this: they show which pages are indexed, which searches you appear for and where something is broken.

But being on Google does not mean ChatGPT will start recommending your company. Your position in regular search and your presence in AI answers are linked, though they are not the same thing. So today you need a separate check: which questions AI already mentions your business for, whom it recommends instead of you and what information about you it is missing.

What to do: set up search analytics, check indexing and test every so often whether your company shows up across different AI services.

AI search optimization in practice: the SunClub Business directory

When we built the SunClub Business directory, we wanted its business pages to make sense to search engines as well as to people from day one.

In the first two months, 154 business pages went live, each published in four languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Spanish and English.

We added markup, built question-and-answer sections, opened the pages to search engine crawlers and set up indexing.

Results came within the first few weeks: Spanish companies began finding the directory through ChatGPT and applying on their own.

For us this is the core principle: AI search optimization happens step by step, and every step needs measuring. There is no magic switch.

If you run a business in Spain, you can add it to the SunClub Business directory for free.

Frequently asked questions

What is SEO for ChatGPT called?

Most often GEO, short for generative engine optimization. You will also hear “AI SEO”, “ChatGPT SEO” and “AI search optimization”. A related term is AEO, answer engine optimization.

Where does ChatGPT get its information about businesses?

From two places. The first is what the model learned during training. That knowledge stops at a certain date, and a new business is almost certainly not in it. The second is live search. When someone asks about a town and a service, ChatGPT searches the web, reads several pages and builds an answer from them, with links. Those pages are fetched by OpenAI’s crawler, called OAI-SearchBot. Copilot relies on Bing, and Google’s AI Mode on Google Search.

How is GEO different from SEO?

On Google you compete for a place in a list of ten links and might end up seventh. An AI answer usually names two or three companies, and there is no seventh place. The foundation is shared: a crawler has to find your page, understand what it is about and trust it. That is why GEO is built on top of regular SEO.

Do I need my own website for ChatGPT to recommend my business?

It helps, but it is not essential. AI assistants cite any open page that answers the question: your Google profile, a business page in a directory, an article about you in the media. Ideally there are several such pages and the details on them match.

How can I tell if ChatGPT is already sending me customers?

Look in your website analytics for visits with chatgpt.com as the source: ChatGPT adds the tag utm_source=chatgpt.com to its links by itself. Ask new customers how they heard about you, and add “ChatGPT recommended you” as an option on your enquiry form. For Copilot, Bing Webmaster Tools has a report on citations.

How long does it take to see results?

There is no fixed timeline. Search engines find a new page within days or weeks. It starts appearing in AI answers once there is enough information about you in different places. Our directory opened on 21 August, and between 22 September and 6 October almost one in five applications came through ChatGPT.

How much does generative engine optimization cost?

It depends on the current state of your website and of your company’s information online. The first step is an audit: what AI can see about you now and what it is missing. That audit is where a consultation with Viktor Shevchenko starts, and with the promo code SunClub it is free. More on that below.

Is ChatGPT already recommending your business?

Ask an AI assistant a question the way a future customer would. For example: “Recommend a good air conditioning repair service in Benidorm.” Which companies did it name? Is yours on the list?

If not, it does not mean you do poor work or are weaker than your competitors. Search engines may simply have too little information about your business.

That is what we help businesses with.

SunClub: SEO and GEO for businesses in Spain

At SunClub we work on technical marketing and generative engine optimization for businesses in Spain.

We help you see how visible your company is online, find technical and data problems, and put together a plan to get found on Google, ChatGPT and other search services.

We work with websites, SEO, content structure, business directories, online reputation and analytics.

To be clear: nobody can promise you a specific spot in ChatGPT’s answers. What we can do is make your company’s information more open, more complete and more accurate, step by step.

Want to know why AI recommends your competitors and not you?

Book a consultation with Viktor Shevchenko, director of technical marketing at SunClub. He works with clients in English and Spanish. With the promo code SunClub, the consultation is free.

Together we will work out what you are missing and where to start so that customers can find you more easily.