More customers now ask an AI tool before they search: 'best web design company in Kathmandu', 'which hospital in Bharatpur has a good cardiologist', 'trekking agency in Pokhara for Annapurna'. If your business isn't in the answer, you're not in the running. This is what people mean by GEO, generative engine optimization.
Can you pay to rank on ChatGPT?
There's no way to buy a place in an AI's organic answer. What you can do is make your business easy for these tools to find, understand and trust. Anyone selling a guaranteed ChatGPT ranking is overpromising.
Where AI tools get their information
- Search results: ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews pull from live web results
- Your website, especially clear factual pages
- Google Business Profile, reviews and maps data
- Directories, news articles and association listings
- Forums, Reddit and comparison articles
Seven steps that help
- Rank in normal search first; AI tools lean heavily on pages that already rank
- Write pages that state plainly what you do, where, for whom and at what price
- Answer questions directly at the top of each page
- Use structured data (Organization, LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ)
- Keep your name, address and phone identical everywhere
- Earn mentions on Nepali news sites, directories and association pages
- Collect genuine reviews that describe what you did
Allow AI crawlers
Check your robots.txt. Some sites block AI crawlers such as GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot or ClaudeBot by accident. If they can't read your pages, they can't cite them. Also make sure your content is in the HTML, not loaded only by JavaScript, because many AI crawlers don't run JavaScript.
How to measure it
Make a list of 20–30 questions your customers would ask an AI. Run them monthly in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google, and note whether you're mentioned, how you're described and whether you're linked. In Google Analytics, watch referral traffic from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com.
| Signal | Where to check |
|---|---|
| Mentioned in answers | Monthly prompt tests across AI tools |
| Described correctly | Same tests: services, location, prices |
| Linked as a source | Citations in Perplexity, ChatGPT search, AI Overviews |
| Visits from AI | GA4 referral traffic |
