Field notesGenerative Engine Optimization, written down.
How ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews decide which businesses to recommend, and what you can change on your side to be one of them. Written for cafes, restaurants, hotels and tour operators.
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Is NovaTechRay related to NovaTech? No.
On 6 November 2026 an AI assistant linked NovaTechRay to an SEC fraud case against NovaTech Ltd. What the SEC page says, what NovaTechRay sells, and how to tell the two apart.
Google built a fast lane for forum posts on 8 October. Your business cannot apply to it.
On 8 October 2026 Google documented the UGC Fresh Data Program, a private pipeline that lets large forums and social platforms push fresh user posts and engagement counts into Search. Who qualifies, what Google does and does not promise, why a single business is shut out, and what user generated content SEO looks like for everyone else.
Google rewrote its AI content guidance on 1 October. The new line is about fact-checking, not volume.
On 1 October 2026 Google updated its guidance on using generative AI content. Comparing the page with an archived July copy shows the rater guideline pointers were already there. The new part says models predict words rather than retrieve facts, and that all AI-generated content, metadata included, should be fact-checked by hand before publishing. What that means for sites that want to be cited in AI answers.
GEO agency for a local business: an honest list, with us on it
A GEO agency for a local business, and the best GEO agencies to compare: six that sell to small or local firms, what their own pages say, the free routes, and who should not hire us.
Is ChatGPT shopping research gone? The help page now redirects, and I found no retirement note from OpenAI.
Google finishes 'chatgpt shopping research' with 'gone' and 'removed'. On 6 November 2026 OpenAI's old help link redirected to Shopping with ChatGPT Search, a page that never uses the phrase, while the release notes showed no removal entry. What the evidence supports, what it does not, and what a store should do with the signals OpenAI does publish.
The ChatGPT merchant program is a waitlist and a product feed. OpenAI is moving away from Instant Checkout.
Google finishes 'chatgpt merchant' with 'program', 'application form', 'feed' and 'portal'. OpenAI's merchant page, read on 22 October 2026, says merchants apply to share a product feed and join a waitlist, Shopify and Etsy catalogs are already integrated, there are no fees on purchases that start in ChatGPT, and OpenAI is moving away from a standalone Instant Checkout. One vendor's test of the new Shop at buttons adds a caution. What a store should do, and what nobody has shown yet.
ChatGPT Atlas is retired. OpenAI's agent now browses from three places, and its crawler list names none of them.
Google still finishes 'chatgpt atlas' with 'browser', 'windows' and 'download'. OpenAI's help centre, read on 24 October 2026, says Atlas has been retired and gets no updates. Browsing moved into a built-in browser in the ChatGPT desktop app, a Chrome extension and a remote cloud browser. What OpenAI has documented for website owners, what it has not, and the three things worth doing.
Bing's AI Performance report now shows the queries where rivals get cited and you do not. Read it as a sample.
On 13 October 2026 Microsoft added Topics Portfolio, a beta tab in the Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance report that groups your grounding queries into topics and lists opportunity queries where other sites are cited and yours is not. What the report counts, which AI surfaces it covers, why a small site may see nothing, and how to use it without reading a sample as a ledger.
Ads in AI Overviews: you cannot opt out, cannot target them, and cannot see them separately in reports
Google's Ads help page on AI-powered Search experiences, read on 6 November 2026, says existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max ads can show inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, that advertisers cannot target the placement or opt out of it separately from Search, and that results sit in aggregate in standard reports. It also now says ads do not influence organic AI answers. What that means for a business deciding between paying for the box and being cited in it.
Google added more links to AI Mode and AI Overviews. It still will not show you the clicks.
On 15 October 2026 Google announced five link changes across AI Mode and AI Overviews: more inline links, a test that puts one or two official pages at the top, wider news carousels, clickable related articles and creator profile links. What each one means for a business that wants to be the linked page, and why you cannot measure any of it in Search Console yet.
Gemini 4 Argon is in AI Mode now. Most of your customers will not be using it.
On 13 October 2026 Google put Gemini 4 Argon into AI Mode in Search, for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers only. Google's announcement says nothing about links or sources. What the launch changes for a business that wants to be cited, what it does not, and how to keep your AI Mode tests readable when the model moves every few weeks.
Are ChatGPT citations accurate? What the one measured study found, and what to do when you are cited wrong
The Tow Center tested eight AI search tools on 1,600 queries in early 2025 and found the tools named the wrong source on more than three of every five. OpenAI's own help page now says citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect. What that means for a business cited for something it never said, or linked to the wrong page.
Perplexity ranking factors: what Perplexity has said, what studies guess, and what nobody knows
Perplexity publishes no list of ranking factors. What its own crawler docs and help center say about how it finds, indexes and labels sources, what is known only from third-party studies, what is still unknown, and the few steps the evidence supports.
ChatGPT hotel booking: what a chain's ChatGPT plugin changes for an independent hotel
On 7 October 2026 OpenAI published a case study on Radisson Hotel Group's ChatGPT plugin: map results, price comparison and amenities inside the chat, with the booking finished on Radisson's own site. What that changes for an independent property that has no plugin, and the three things it can still control.
Is ChatGPT a search engine? What OpenAI's own docs say, for a business that wants to be found
ChatGPT searches the web when a question needs current information, rewrites your customer's question into its own queries, sends some of them to outside search providers, and keeps its own index and cache. What OpenAI's help pages said on 11 October 2026, how that differs from Google, and the parts a business can control.
AI Mode in Chrome's address bar: what reaches it, what you can measure, and what Google has not said
Press Tab then Enter in Chrome's address bar and you open AI Mode instead of running a search. Tab moves to the button, Enter selects it. How to hide it.
PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User: what each one fetches, and what the stealth crawling report means for your robots.txt
Perplexity documents two user agents. PerplexityBot indexes pages for Perplexity search and obeys robots.txt. Perplexity-User fetches a page when someone asks a question, and Perplexity's own docs say it generally ignores robots.txt. In August 2025 Cloudflare reported an undeclared crawler it tied to Perplexity, and Perplexity denied it. The two user-agent strings, what each one fetches, what the report claimed, and the robots.txt and firewall rules a business site should ship.
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User: what each OpenAI bot does, and what to put in robots.txt
OpenAI runs three bots most sites see: GPTBot crawls for model training, OAI-SearchBot decides whether you appear in ChatGPT search, and ChatGPT-User fetches a page when a person asks. The exact user-agent strings, how robots.txt applies to each, the four published IP lists we checked on 9 October 2026, and three copy-paste robots.txt files for the three common choices.
GPT-6 answers with charts, forms and tools now. OpenAI has not said where your citation goes.
On 7 October 2026 OpenAI shipped GPT-6 with Intelligent UI, which lets ChatGPT answer with charts, buttons, forms and tools it builds on request. The announcement and the GPT-6 help page say nothing about how cited sources appear inside those answers. ChatGPT's search help page still says citations appear when available. What we know, what we do not, which pages are most exposed, and four checks to run this week.
Do AI crawlers respect robots.txt? What each company promises, and what the logs show
OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity all say their crawlers obey robots.txt. OpenAI and Perplexity both carve out the fetches a user triggers. Cloudflare's own tests caught one company crawling under a disguised browser identity, and HasData found 234 of 592 sites that ban GPTBot in robots.txt still served it a page. What each company promises, what the evidence shows, whether AI bots are blocked by default, and the layered way to block them.
ClaudeBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot: what robots.txt does to each of Anthropic's crawlers
Anthropic runs three bots: ClaudeBot for training data, Claude-SearchBot for search indexing and Claude-User for fetches a person asks for. Its help page, re-read on 6 November 2026, says all three obey robots.txt and Crawl-delay, and it links one IP list for all of them. What a Disallow does to each, how to detect ClaudeBot in your logs, and why Anthropic warns against blocking by IP.
You can opt out of Google's AI Overviews now. Here is what the switch does and does not touch.
Since 31 August 2026 every site in Search Console has a Search generative AI control that excludes it from AI Overviews, AI Mode and generative AI features in Discover. Google's help page says it is not a ranking signal, does not affect AI training, and takes a few days to apply. On 6 October Google added a note on child properties overriding a parent. What the switch covers, the inheritance trap, and why most businesses should leave it on.
The September 2026 spam update finished on 8 October. If your GEO pages were built at scale, read this first.
Google's September 2026 spam update ran from 24 September to 8 October, per Google's Search Status Dashboard, against about two days for its previous two spam updates. Google's own AI features page says a page must be eligible for normal Search to be a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode. What that means for GEO programmes that publish hundreds of templated pages, what Google has and has not said, and how to read your own data before blaming the update.
Gemini tagged its links with UTMs, then reportedly stopped. The AI Overviews tag was a browser extension.
On 1 October 2026 Search Engine Journal reported that Gemini had started adding UTM parameters to outbound links, and Google's John Mueller said he could see it too. A day later a reported AI Overviews tracking parameter turned out to be a Chrome extension. On 30 October Search Engine Roundtable reported the Gemini tags had stopped around 28 September. What changed, what I got wrong in two older posts, and how to confirm it in your own data.
A judge threw out the AI Overviews traffic lawsuits. Your controls are the only lever left.
On 1 October 2026 Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the antitrust suits Penske Media and Chegg brought against Google over AI Overviews, ruling that 'an expectation is not an agreement.' What the ruling says, what I could not read, and the four controls a business has over how Google's AI features use its pages.
Google's AI Mode now watches the web for your customers. What it reads, and how to be the update
On 28 September 2026 Google began rolling out AI Mode's information monitoring to all users: tell it what to look for and Search keeps checking sites, forums, social posts, real-time data and the Shopping Graph. What it reads, the two things Google has not said, and five things a business can do so the next alert is about it.
Lighthouse now audits agentic browsing. What it checks, and what it says about AI answers
Lighthouse 13.5, released on 18 September 2026, adds an Agent Resource Discovery audit and groups it with llms.txt under agent discovery, inside an experimental Agentic Browsing category with no 0 to 100 score. What each audit checks, why Not Applicable is often the right result, the file-name mismatch in the new audit, and what none of it tells you about being cited.
Search Console's generative AI report: what it counts and what it leaves out
Since 31 August 2026 every site can open a Search Console report for impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and since 24 September it has a multimodal filter. What an impression means there, why there is no query column, the August logging gap, and five ways to use it without over-reading it.
ChatGPT ads have no minimum now. They buy the slot under the answer, not the answer.
OpenAI says its ad business reached a $1 billion annualized run rate in under 200 days, and Briefs reported the minimum spend going from $200,000 to nothing in three months. What an ad buys, what OpenAI says it cannot buy, and how to decide between paying for the slot and earning the mention.
The 200 characters under your H1
Resoneo found ChatGPT's index stores about 200 characters per page, taken from the H1 forward and frozen at crawl time. Here is the four-slot pattern for that block, three templates with placeholders, and a one-minute check for every page you already have.
Speakable and FAQ rich results: two levers that stopped paying
Google retired FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026 and speakable only ever fed a news feature for smart speakers. What to strike from an audit, what to keep for machine reading, and why.
Semrush found comparison queries name a brand 2.4x as often: the page to publish next
Semrush's ghost citations study put the brand mention rate on comparative queries at 43.3 percent against 18 percent on informational ones. For a local business that is one page: you against the two names the assistant already gives. Here is how to build it without an invented claim.
What AI Overviews cost you in clicks, according to the people who measured it
Three credible studies put the click loss from AI Overviews at roughly 15 percent, at close to a halving, and at 38 percent. They are all defensible, and the gap between them is the useful part.
One market already lets publishers bill Google for AI impressions
To launch AI Overviews in France, Google agreed to an opt-out, separate AI-versus-classic reporting, and payment tied to AI impressions. That package is a preview of the argument everywhere else.
How much of an AI citation is just your Google ranking?
Our September version said most AI citations already rank top ten. Ahrefs' March 2026 update says about 38 percent do. Here is the corrected evidence and what it changes.
Google now routes search clicks through a redirect. Check your Direct traffic.
Google confirmed the google.com/goto passthrough in late August 2026. It is aimed at scrapers, and the side effect lands on your analytics and your rank tracking.
AI answers moved into Gmail this week
Gmail search AI Overviews went global on 15 September and finish rolling out on 21 September, on by default. A new AI answer surface, and the first one you cannot optimise for.
Reddit lost 86 percent of its ChatGPT citations in about a week
One robots.txt line took Reddit from roughly 3.83 percent of ChatGPT Search citations to 0.52 percent. Google's surfaces barely moved and Perplexity did not. The off-site surface is now built per engine.
Is Cloudflare blocking ChatGPT from your website?
The September 2026 Cloudflare change only recommends restrictions for sites that earn money from ads. The change that quietly blocks AI crawlers on a restaurant or clinic site landed in July 2025.
The research says hiding your prices keeps you out of AI answers
A SIGIR 2026 experiment ran 252,000 trials across six models. Publishing a price was a gatekeeper. Restructuring the same content did nothing. What that means for a clinic.
Three corrections to every GA4 guide for tracking ChatGPT referrals
GA4's AI Assistant channel excludes Perplexity, a third to two thirds of AI sessions land in Direct, and most ChatGPT referrals now hit your homepage. Fix the setup before you report the number.
Does llms.txt do anything? 97 percent of the files Ahrefs found got zero requests
Ahrefs checked 137,210 domains and found almost nothing fetching llms.txt. Google says it neither harms nor helps. Here is the one case John Mueller conceded, and how to check your own logs.
Block, allow or price: the AI crawler decision after Cloudflare's September flip
Cloudflare's 15 September 2026 default is a publisher story. The decision a normal business site has to make is narrower: which crawlers to block, which to allow, and whether pricing is even available to you.
ChatGPT can book a table now. Can it book yours?
Since 10 August 2026 ChatGPT books restaurant tables through Yelp, OpenTable and Resy. Why that splits into two problems for restaurants, and why joining may still be the wrong call.
Why every AI visibility tool gives you a different number
Why every AI visibility tool gives you a different number for the same brand, and the sampling method that produces a figure you can defend.
Where ChatGPT gets its restaurant recommendations
Where ChatGPT gets its restaurant recommendations, what a 2,880-prompt test found about Yelp and Foursquare, and why listings come before your website.
What GEO should cost a single-location cafe, and when you should not buy it
What GEO should cost a single-location cafe: mostly a one-off technical fix plus listings hygiene, when a retainer earns its keep, and when to walk away.
The booking that came from ChatGPT and never showed up in your analytics
Why a booking that came from ChatGPT never showed up in your analytics: stripped referrers, inflated Direct traffic, and what you can and cannot know.
Your restaurant ranks first on Google and ChatGPT has never heard of it
Why a restaurant can rank first on Google while ChatGPT has never heard of it, and the boring causes: a JavaScript menu, CDN bot rules, listings that disagree.
If your menu loads in JavaScript, no AI can read it
Why a JavaScript-loaded menu is invisible to ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, how to run the disable-JavaScript test, and whether the fix is a template or a rebuild.
Most GEO is a scam. Here is the part that is not.
A direct answer to whether GEO is a scam: which parts are rebranded SEO or unsupported by evidence, and the narrow set of work that survives scrutiny.
Nine things in a GEO pitch that should end the meeting
Nine things in a GEO pitch that should end the meeting, from guaranteed placement and the 40 percent figure to llms.txt on the invoice, with the evidence for each.
Is GEO replacing SEO?
A direct answer to whether generative engine optimization replaces search engine optimization, what the measured overlap is, and where the two genuinely diverge.
How to get ChatGPT to recommend your business
What determines whether an AI assistant names your business in an answer, separated from the tactics that are sold hard and supported by nothing.
What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
GEO is making a business legible to AI answer engines so it gets named when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google for a recommendation. How it differs from SEO.
AI search for tour operators and experience businesses
Experience queries carry constraints: duration, group size, fitness level, language, weather. Tour operators who publish those constraints win the queries that convert.
Getting a specialty coffee shop found in AI search
Coffee queries are attribute-driven: roaster, brew methods, wifi, seating, laptop policy. How a small cafe publishes the details that decide those queries.
Schema markup for AI search: which types matter
Which schema types are worth deploying for a hospitality business, what to put in each, and the honest limit: a matched study found no lift in AI citations.
How to get your restaurant recommended by ChatGPT and Perplexity
A checklist for restaurants that want to appear when someone asks an AI assistant where to eat: entity setup, the attributes behind filtered queries, and cited sources.
llms.txt: what it is, how to write one, and whether it does anything yet
A plain guide to the llms.txt proposal with a working example, and an honest assessment: Google says it does not use the file and no major provider reads it in answers.
How to measure whether AI assistants are recommending you
There is no Search Console for ChatGPT. A workable measurement system: a prompt set, sampling on a schedule, and the four metrics worth reporting to a client.
How AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend
What happens between a question like 'best coffee near me' and the three names an assistant returns, and which parts of that pipeline a business can influence.
Google AI Overviews: what local businesses can influence
AI Overviews sit above the results a local business relied on. What feeds them, which levers exist, and how to stop losing the clicks position one used to bring.
GEO vs SEO: what changes, and what stays exactly the same
A practical comparison of Generative Engine Optimization and SEO: which SEO work carries over, which habits stop paying, and where the two genuinely conflict.
AI search visibility for boutique hotels and small properties
Independent hotels compete for AI recommendations against OTAs with far more content. Where the leverage sits: attribute depth, trip-intent language and cited sources.