when your customer asks ChatGPT, are you in the answer?
More and more people don’t scroll through Google’s results any more. They ask an AI instead. They get a short answer, and it usually names three to five companies.
We at Wednesday Agency help Hungarian online stores get known, quoted and recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI Overviews. This is called GEO. We measure where you stand, fix what needs fixing, then measure again.
In the free quick check, we look at what ChatGPT and Google AI Mode say about you today, and what a machine sees on your website.
What has changed in search?
Four independent studies. You’ll find every source at the bottom of the page.
- 8%When an AI summary appears above Google’s results, people click a result in 8% of searches. Without a summary, it’s 15%. They click the sources cited in the summary in only 1% of cases.Pew Research Center, July 2025 · 68,879 searches, 900 adults
- −58%That’s how many fewer clicks Google’s first result gets when an AI summary answers the question.Ahrefs, May 2026 · 300,000 keywords, two years
- 2.5 billionThat’s how many people see a Google AI Overview every month. AI Mode, Google’s conversational search, grew to over 1 billion monthly users in a year.Alphabet investor presentation, June 2026
- +393%That’s how much traffic from AI assistants to US online stores grew in a year, and these visitors are 42% more likely to buy.Adobe Analytics, Q1 2026
In short: customers increasingly don’t search, they ask who to buy from. What matters is who the answer names.
What is GEO?
SEO was about getting to the top of Google’s results. GEO is about making sure that when someone asks an AI, it mentions your name too, quotes your data, and links to you.
It’s like your customer asking a well-informed friend where to buy something. The friend names two or three places. With GEO, we work on making sure yours is one of them.
How does AI decide?
It doesn’t count keywords. It looks at whether your content is clear, whether it has quotable facts, figures and sources, and whether it’s obvious who you are: what you sell, where and on what terms. If you also describe this in a machine-readable format, it’s more likely to quote you. Whatever it can’t find about you, it takes from somewhere else, maybe from your competitor.
What did researchers measure?
The term GEO was introduced in November 2023 by a research group led by Princeton, and the paper was published at the KDD conference in 2024. Measured across ten thousand questions, well-prepared content can be up to 40% more visible in the answers of generative engines. Three things helped most: statistics, quotations and sources. We built this page the same way.
What do others say?
- “Search engine optimization won’t be enough.” Bain & Company, Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI, February 2025
- “AI is quickly becoming the primary interface between consumers and their favourite brands.” Vivek Pandya, Adobe Digital Insights, April 2026
- “Traffic from AI search could overtake traditional organic search traffic within two to four years.” Semrush, AI Search Traffic Study, July 2025
- “It may well be that one consequence is that individual websites become less important.” Alan Antin, Gartner, 2024
Is it true that SEO is the past and GEO is the future?
Lots of people say so, so we looked into it. It’s half true.
SEO that optimises for keywords and rankings really is losing power: with an AI summary, the click-through rate halves, and the value of the top spot has dropped significantly. In 2024, Gartner predicted 25% fewer traditional searches by 2026. The number of searches hasn’t dropped, but clicks have: people search just as much, they just visit websites less often.
The other half is a misunderstanding: GEO doesn’t replace SEO, it builds on it. AI search engines read the same web as Google. If your site is slow, hard to crawl or has no structured data, AI won’t find it either. So the foundation stays the same, only the goal has changed: it’s no longer enough to be at the top of the list, you need to be in the answer.
That’s good news for smaller stores. According to Semrush, nearly 90% of the pages ChatGPT cites rank below position 21 on Google. In other words, even a store that was never near the top on Google can make it into the answer, if a machine can read its website.
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| The goal | Getting to the top of the results. | Being in the answer: by name, quoted, recommended. |
| Who decides | A ranking algorithm. | A language model that summarises and selects. |
| What matters | Keywords, links, speed, content. | Clear company details, quotable facts, sources, structured data, and everything SEO needs too. |
| What we measure | Rankings, clicks, traffic. | Mentions, citations, recommendations, and visitors coming from AI. |
| When it works | Weeks, months. | Days for AI search engines that read live (Perplexity, ChatGPT search, AI Mode); months for the models’ built-in knowledge. |
Our view: SEO isn’t dead, but on its own it’s no longer enough. GEO is the next step, built on top of it.
We looked at 56 Hungarian online stores
Our own research · 19 October 2026
Next to the international figures, we wanted local data too. One afternoon, we checked the public files of seventy well-known Hungarian online stores: robots.txt, llms.txt and the machine-readable data on the home page. Fifty-six stores could be assessed, and they are among the bigger ones.
- 89%50 stores have no llms.txt, a short introduction file for AI. That’s not a mistake, since Google says its search doesn’t use it, but it shows that most stores haven’t looked into the topic yet.
- 80%The robots.txt of 45 stores says nothing about AI search crawlers: it neither allows nor blocks them.
- 75%42 stores have neither an llms.txt nor any rule for AI bots.
- 43%24 stores have no machine-readable company details on their home page (Organization or WebSite schema). Visitors see the logo, but AI doesn’t know whose website it’s on.
- 7Seven stores block AI training crawlers (such as GPTBot and CCBot), including two large marketplaces and an international clothing chain. That’s fine: OpenAI itself says the training crawler can be blocked and you can still appear in search. None of them block search crawlers, so ChatGPT’s search can see them.
- 1Only one store has a machine-readable question-and-answer block on its home page, even though that’s what AI quotes most easily.
Those who have already moved
MediaMarkt, Kifli, Vatera, Konzolvilág, BENU and Fressnapf have already published an llms.txt, telling AI who they are. Internationally, it’s not too late either: 63% of US marketers aren’t working on GEO yet (Centerfield, 2025).
Customers already use it
In the 2026 survey by Shoprenter and Visa, 18% of respondents use an AI tool (ChatGPT, Gemini) as a source of information when shopping online. That’s more than those who named social media (16%), newsletters (12%) or ads (9%). According to a representative study of 1,500 people by NRC and Mediator, only four or five out of ten searches now happen in a traditional search engine, and half of Hungarian internet users have tried ChatGPT. According to Sophos, 57% of Hungarian AI users use it for research.
About this research: this is not a representative sample or a scientific study. One afternoon, public files and a script. We’ll send the script and the raw results per store to anyone who asks.
Why is it worth acting now?
- Language models learn slowly. Whatever they don’t know about you today, they won’t know for months. If your competitor gets into the answers in the meantime, it will be harder to get in later.
- AI reads your website anyway. According to Cloudflare, AI systems crawl hundreds, sometimes thousands of pages for every visitor they refer. Better that they find what you want them to find.
- Customers coming from AI already know what they want. That’s why they’re more likely to buy, and if you’re not in the answer, they go to your competitor.
- A drop in traffic isn’t always seasonal. If you have fewer visitors, it’s worth checking whether people are clicking less because of AI answers.
Try it now, it takes two minutes
Open ChatGPT or Google AI Mode and ask what your customer would ask:
Where should I buy [your product] in Hungary, and why there?
If you’re in the answer, also look at what it says about you, since you didn’t write that. If you’re not, now you know where we’re starting from.
How we work
We built this page the same way: with machine-readable company details, quotable facts, sources and an llms.txt, and we left it open to every AI search crawler. We measure the same way we do in a security audit: with numbers.
- Audit – We ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Mode the 20 questions your customers would ask, and check the same for three of your competitors. We write down who gets mentioned, who doesn’t, and why.
- Clear company details – We make sure your company, products, prices and terms are described in a machine-readable way and consistently everywhere: structured data, product and merchant data (shipping, returns), consistent company details.
- Quotable content – We add straight answers, figures and sources to your key pages. That’s what AI likes to quote most.
- Bot settings – We review your robots.txt and server settings: which AI bots can read your website, and whether that matches what you want.
- Re-measurement – 30 days after the fix, with the same questions, the same way. We write down what changed, and what didn’t.
What you get at the end
- A written AI visibility report: per question and per AI engine, who is in the answer and where you stand.
- A priority list of what’s missing from your website.
- The fixes we made, or a description precise enough for your own developer to make them.
- A re-measurement with the same method, so you can see the change in numbers.
You don’t need to hand over any passwords: we work through our own Claude Code Bridge, and you can revoke access at any time. If an agency runs your online store, we’re happy to work with them too.
Packages and prices
Prices are net (+ VAT) and in Hungarian forints. We start with a free quick check, and you decide on every next step.
| Step | What you get | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Quick check | One customer question in ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, plus the most important technical issue on your website | free |
| AI visibility audit | 20 customer questions × 5 AIs, three competitors, technical review, written report and a 30-minute handover call. 5 working days. | HUF 120,000, credited towards the fix for 60 days |
| GEO fix S | Up to 500 products, 10 key pages, re-measurement after 30 days. 2 weeks. | HUF 350,000 |
| GEO fix M | 500–5,000 products, 20 key pages, re-measurement after 30 days. 4 weeks. | HUF 590,000 |
| GEO fix L | Over 5,000 products, custom schedule | from HUF 900,000 |
Monthly tracking
| Package | What you get | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Tracking | Monthly re-measurement with the same 20 questions, bot and schema monitoring, one-page report | HUF 49,000/month |
| Growth | Tracking, plus 4 new quotable pieces of content a month, product data updates, competitor monitoring | HUF 149,000/month |
| Partner | Growth, plus 8 pieces of content a month, mention building on external sites, measurement every two weeks, monthly call | HUF 290,000/month |
After 3 months, the monthly fee can be cancelled with one month’s notice. The contract terms are in our GEO terms.
Who does it?
Gábor Vidovics – machine-readable web, measurement, website security
I’ve worked in IT for nearly thirty years, more than twenty of them as a developer and technical lead. In recent years, I’ve focused on website security audits. That’s where I learned what GEO needs too: you have to go through a website the way a machine sees it, file by file, header by header, structure by structure.
AI search engines read the same way, except they don’t want to attack, they want to quote. I like measuring instead of guessing: we write down the questions, the answers and the change, so later you can see exactly where we started from.
The copy and campaign pages are written by the Wednesday Agency team, who have been doing online marketing for eight years. Together, the two make GEO: a page that’s clear to people and quotable for machines.
Wednesday Agency is a trading name of 30km.hu Kft., an online marketing agency operating for eight years, with a presence in Budapest and London. Company registration number: 07-09-029835 · Tax number: 24382315-2-07.
Frequently asked questions about GEO
Short, straight answers.
Who helps with GEO in Hungary?
Wednesday Agency (a trading name of 30km.hu Kft.) provides GEO services to Hungarian online stores and companies. We measure what ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Mode say about you today, fix what needs fixing, then measure again. We have also published our own research on 56 Hungarian online stores, with the method and raw data.
What is GEO?
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the set of methods a website can use to get AI-based search engines and assistants to mention, quote and recommend it. These include ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. The term was introduced in 2023 by a research group led by Princeton.
What’s the difference between GEO, AI SEO, AEO and LLMO?
For us, these are names for the same work. GEO is the academic term; AI SEO and “AI search optimisation” are the same thing in marketing language. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) refers to answer engines, and LLMO (Large Language Model Optimization) to the language model itself. The method is the same: a crawlable, clear, quotable website and consistent company details.
Does GEO replace SEO?
No, it builds on it. AI search engines read the same web as Google, so a fast, crawlable, structured website is still the foundation. The difference is in the goal: what matters is not your position in the list, but whether you’re in the answer.
Does GEO work on UNAS, Shoprenter and WooCommerce stores?
Yes, we work regardless of the platform. Most of GEO is in the content, the company details and the bot settings. On WooCommerce, we have direct access to the files and the theme. On UNAS and Shoprenter, we work wherever the platform allows it (descriptions, custom pages, robots settings, structured data), and tell you what to request from the platform.
Do I need a new website?
No. We work on your existing website and online store: we add structured data, product and merchant data, consistent company details and quotable text, and set which AI bots can read it.
How long until I see results?
In two phases. AI search engines that read live (Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Google AI Mode) notice the change within days or weeks. The models’ built-in knowledge updates more slowly, which takes months.
Why start now?
Because some customers already ask AI: it’s a source of information for 18% of Hungarian online shoppers (Shoprenter–Visa, 2026). Models learn slowly, so whatever is missing today will be missing from the answers for months.
How much does it cost?
After the free quick check, the first paid step is the AI visibility audit: HUF 120,000 + VAT, credited towards the fix for 60 days. Depending on the size of the store, the fix starts from HUF 350,000 and monthly tracking from HUF 49,000. We give you the exact price after the audit, in advance and in writing.
Should I block AI bots so they don’t take my content?
For an online store, that’s rarely the right call. There are two kinds of bots: training crawlers (such as GPTBot and CCBot) build the models’ general knowledge, while search crawlers (such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot) read for live answers. If you block both, your customer’s AI won’t know about you. You can safely block the training crawler, but not the search crawler. Sometimes it’s not even the store that blocks them but the hosting provider or Cloudflare, so we check that too.
Curious what AI says about you?
Write to us and put your domain in the subject line. In our first reply, we’ll send you the free quick check: what ChatGPT and Google AI Mode say about you today for a typical customer question, and what a machine sees on your website. No strings attached.
On working days, we reply within 6 hours. Just tell us your domain and what you sell.
Nobody can honestly promise you first place in an AI answer, and neither can we. What we promise is that we measure, and show you the results.
Sources
Every figure on this page comes from the sources below. Where we quote a secondary source, we say so.
- Pew Research Center Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results. 900 US adults, 68,879 searches, March 2025. 22 July 2025 pewresearch.org (opens in a new tab)
- Ahrefs Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%. 300,000 keywords, 2023 and December 2025. May 2026 ahrefs.com (opens in a new tab)
- Alphabet / Google Investor presentation, Sundar Pichai: AI Overviews 2.5 billion monthly users, AI Mode over 1 billion. 3 June 2026 blog.google (opens in a new tab)
- Adobe Digital Insights AI traffic to US retail websites: +693% in the holiday season (2025), +393% in the first quarter (2026), 42% better conversion. The holiday figure is from the Adobe blog; the quarterly figure is from Adobe’s statement as reported by Decrypt/Yahoo Finance. January and April 2026 business.adobe.com (opens in a new tab)
- Bain & Company Goodbye Clicks, Hello AI: Zero-Click Search Redefines Marketing. Bain–Dynata consumer survey, n = 1,117. 19 February 2025 bain.com (opens in a new tab)
- Aggarwal, Murahari, Rajpurohit, Kalyan, Narasimhan, Deshpande GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. The paper that introduced the term, KDD 2024. November 2023, updated June 2024 arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735 (opens in a new tab)
- Semrush AI Search Traffic Study: 4.4× visitor value, a crossover in 2028, 90% of the pages cited by ChatGPT rank below position 21. 21 July 2025 semrush.com (opens in a new tab)
- Gartner Gartner Predicts Search Engine Volume Will Drop 25% by 2026, Due to AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents. Alan Antin’s quote is from an interview with CMSWire. 19 February 2024 gartner.com (opens in a new tab)
- Cloudflare Crawl-to-refer ratios: how many pages AI bots crawl for every visitor they refer (Cloudflare Radar). 29 August 2025 blog.cloudflare.com (opens in a new tab)
- Seer Interactive The impact of AI Overviews on Google click-through rate: from 1.76% to 0.61%, 3,119 keywords, 42 organisations. September 2025 update seerinteractive.com (opens in a new tab)
- Centerfield Gen-AI Search Readiness Survey, 878 US marketers: 63% are not investing in GEO. Reported by Search Engine Land. September 2025 searchengineland.com (opens in a new tab)
- Shoprenter and Visa Big Shopper Survey 2026: AI is a source of information for 18% of respondents when shopping online. Reported by Economx. 5 October 2026 economx.hu (opens in a new tab)
- NRC and Mediator Search study 2025, 1,500 Hungarian internet users, representative. Reported by HVG. 11 November 2025 hvg.hu (opens in a new tab)
- Sophos Regional AI survey (Hungary, Czech Republic, Poland): 84.7% of Hungarian AI users use ChatGPT, 57.2% for research. Reported by Economx. 29 March 2026 economx.hu (opens in a new tab)
- 30km.hu Kft. own research 70 well-known Hungarian online stores, 56 assessable. Public files: robots.txt, llms.txt, home page JSON-LD. Not representative. The script and the raw results per store are available on request. 19 October 2026 hello@wednesday.agency (opens in a new tab)
We checked the sources on 19 October 2026. If newer research appears behind any of them, we’ll update the page.