How AI Search Engines Find and Cite You (GEO for Job Seekers)
AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude surface you when your information is public, structured, and consistent across the web. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) for a job seeker is simply the practice of making yourself easy for a machine to read and safe for it to quote.
By On The Ground
What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?
SEO optimises to rank as a blue link. GEO optimises to be quoted inside a generated answer. When someone asks an assistant “who are some product designers in Singapore open to freelance work?”, GEO is what determines whether your name is in the answer.
What AI engines look for
- Public, crawlable text — not a PDF locked in an inbox or an image of a resume.
- Structured data (schema.org Person) that labels your name, role, skills, and location unambiguously.
- Consistency: the same name, title, and links across the sources it can see.
- A clear, self-contained summary it can lift without guessing.
The role of llms.txt and machine-readable directories
A growing convention, llms.txt, gives AI crawlers a clean map of a site’s most useful content. Paired with a machine-readable directory — plain text or JSON that lists people with their skills and availability — it lets an agent answer a query in one fetch instead of scraping dozens of pages.
Visible In SG publishes exactly this: an llms.txt, a full-text mirror, and an agent-readable directory of every public profile. If you are listed, you are already formatted the way these tools prefer to read.
What you can do today
- Put your availability somewhere public and structured, not just behind a login.
- Use consistent naming and the same links everywhere.
- Write a clean one-line summary an engine can quote verbatim.
- Make sure a machine can reach it — no walls, no image-only text.