How to make your company show up on ChatGPT (and why Google is no longer enough)

I have friends and clients —some are both— who tell me the same thing: programmers speak another language. And I get it. I've been doing this for 26 years and I still find it boring to sit through a technical conversation full of acronyms and slang.

But boring isn't the worst part. The worst part is not being sure whether they're telling you the truth, or whether what they're saying even makes sense. When someone explains something you don't understand, you have no way to tell if they're helping you or selling you smoke.

This article is so you can stop depending on that translation. I'm going to explain, without unnecessary acronyms, something that's changing the way your customers find companies like yours. And why, if you do nothing about it, you'll lose ground to your competition without noticing.

The only topic that matters

I'll get straight to it, because it's the idea that holds everything else up. The thing that matters to me —and that should matter to you— is one thing only: that your company shows up where your customer is searching today. Not where they were searching five years ago. Today.

And today, your customer searches in more places than you think. Google, of course. But also ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok. The list grows every month.

We're all very excited talking about how artificial intelligence is going to change the world. We make our photos in Ghibli style, we ask it to interpret our lab tests, and then we say we're really worried about our privacy. Meanwhile, there's a fact that almost no one in the business world is looking at head-on.

The fact you're setting aside

More and more people are searching using artificial intelligence instead of Google. You probably knew that already. What you may not have thought about is the consequence.

Searching on Google and "searching" on an AI model are different things. They work differently. They reward different things. And here's the uncomfortable point: your company having a good position on Google doesn't mean it shows up in AI models. They're two separate games. Winning one doesn't qualify you for the other.

This has two readings, depending on where you stand today. If your company already shows up well on Google, good for you, but the bad news is the race is starting over. You worked for years to get where you are, and now there's a new track where your advantage doesn't count. And for now, without the option of buying ads to get ahead.

If your company doesn't show up on Google, you have a big advantage, because for you the race is also starting over. Only in your case, starting from zero is an opportunity, not a loss. And you don't need to pay for ads. Same sentence, two opposite pieces of news. It depends on how comfortable you are with what you have today.

What GEO is and why you should know the term

I want to give you a word, because you're going to need it. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It's the discipline of optimizing a company's presence so it appears and gets recommended in generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini.

It's the equivalent of SEO, but for a world where the answer is no longer a list of ten blue links — it's a paragraph the AI writes directly. The practical difference is enormous.

When someone searches Google for "best logistics agency in Mexico", Google gives them a list. Your customer goes in, compares, decides. Even if you show up in position four, you still have a real shot at being chosen.

When someone asks the same thing to ChatGPT, they don't get a list of ten options to research. They get an answer. Two or three names, sometimes just one, sometimes with an explicit recommendation. If your company isn't among those names, for that person it doesn't exist. It's not that you came in tenth. It's that you weren't in the conversation.

Your competition is already looking this up

I'm not speculating about the future. This is happening today. There are people searching right now "how to appear on ChatGPT" and "how to get my business mentioned when someone asks the AI about my industry".

Some of those people are your competitors. Not necessarily the biggest ones. Often the fastest ones. The ones who understood early that the map changed and decided to move while everyone else was still arguing whether AI "was a fad".

That's the part I think is urgent to communicate. The cost of doing nothing isn't staying the same. It's falling behind, because others are moving.

But GEO doesn't replace SEO

This is where a lot of people get confused, so I want to be clear. GEO doesn't replace SEO. It goes alongside it.

Your customers don't all search the same way or in the same place. Some still Google, and they'll keep doing it for years. Others already ask the AI. And a third group wants the answer directly, without having to enter any site.

That's why, besides SEO and GEO, there's a third concept: AEO, Answer Engine Optimization. It's the discipline of optimizing your content to appear in direct answers — that featured box Google shows above all the results when someone asks a specific question.

SEO, GEO and AEO aren't three options to choose from. They're three fronts you need at the same time, because your customer is spread across all three. A company that only does SEO is optimizing for a third of the map. Maybe half. But not all of it.

What you can do about it

I'm not going to promise this gets solved with a trick. It doesn't get solved with a trick. But the first step is simple, and it's honest: knowing where you stand today.

Do you show up on Google when someone searches for what you sell? Does ChatGPT mention you when asked about your industry? Are you in the direct answers? If you can't answer these three questions, you can't make a single informed decision about your digital presence.

Most companies in Mexico don't have any of the three fronts well-resolved. Not for lack of capability, but because no one explained to them that the map changed. They're still working with the playbook from five years ago because their agency is still working with that playbook. It's not your fault you didn't know. But from today on, it is your responsibility to ask.