In Plain Terms
Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring a website so AI systems — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — can accurately read, understand and cite it when answering a user's question directly, instead of just sending a search-result click.
What It Actually Involves
In practice: an AI-crawler-aware robots.txt that explicitly allows bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot; an llms.txt file summarizing what a site/business actually does in plain text; clean schema.org structured data (Organization, FAQPage, Article); and content written in directly quotable, factual statements rather than marketing fluff that has nothing concrete to cite.
Why It's Not Optional Anymore
AI answer engines are increasingly a research step before a purchase or a hire decision. A site that blocks AI crawlers or has no structured, citable content is invisible to that layer entirely — not ranked lower, just absent from the conversation. This site's own robots.txt and llms.txt (see the homepage) are a working example of the baseline.