What it means
When somebody asks ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity for a good plumber in their town, the assistant fetches pages and summarises them. Generative engine optimisation is the work of making your business reachable and legible to those crawlers: letting them in, serving real text rather than script-built text, and stating your facts plainly.
Why it matters to a small business
The failure here is usually invisible and total. A site can rank perfectly well in Google and be completely absent from assistant answers because a security setting blocks AI crawlers by default, and nothing on any dashboard will ever mention it. You do not lose position, you lose existence.
The bit people get wrong
A welcoming robots.txt proves nothing on its own. Many hosting and security providers block AI crawlers at the network edge, before robots.txt is ever consulted, so the file says come in and the door says no. The only way to know is to request your own page as one of those crawlers and see what comes back, which is what our free AI visibility check does.