SEO and GEO in 2026: how a small business in Singapore or Malaysia gets found on Google and in AI answers

When a customer in Singapore or Johor Bahru looks for a supplier in 2026, they often never see a list of ten blue links. Google answers with an AI Overview, or they ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Copilot and get a short answer with two or three sources. This guide explains what it takes for your business to be one of those sources, and why almost all of it is still ordinary, well-done SEO.

Short answer

SEO (search engine optimisation) gets your pages ranked in Google and Bing. GEO (generative engine optimisation) gets your pages quoted and cited in AI answers from Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. For a small business they are one job, not two.

• Google states there are no extra requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode: a page must be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, though that does not guarantee it will be shown (Google Search Central).
• ChatGPT search and Perplexity use their own crawlers, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot. If your robots.txt or your host's firewall blocks them, you will not be cited in their search answers.
• What gets a passage quoted is content that answers the question in its first sentence, names who and where, and backs its claims with figures and sources. In the 2023 GEO study (published at KDD 2024), adding quotations, statistics and citations raised visibility in AI answers by up to 40%; keyword stuffing did not help.

Key takeaways

• You do not need an AI text file, special markup or a new schema type to appear in Google's AI features. Google says so in writing.
• Blocking AI training is not the same as blocking AI search. You can disallow GPTBot and still be cited in ChatGPT search. Disallowing Google-Extended keeps you in Google Search, but also keeps your pages out of answers in the Gemini app.
• Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026 (Google Search Central). FAQ sections are still worth writing, because AI answers quote them, but not for the rich result.
• Microsoft's Bing Webmaster Tools has reported Copilot citations per page since February 2026, as a free public preview (Bing Webmaster Blog).
• For a local business, in our experience a complete Google Business Profile with steady reviews still does more than any GEO tactic. Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence.

What SEO and GEO actually mean

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the work of making your web pages easy for search engines to crawl, understand and rank for the searches your customers type. Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of making those same pages easy for AI assistants to retrieve, quote and cite when they write an answer. The term GEO comes from a 2023 research paper led by researchers at Princeton University and published at the KDD 2024 conference (Aggarwal et al.).

The difference is in what winning looks like. In SEO, you win a position in a list and hope for the click. In GEO, you win a sentence inside an answer, usually with a small link to your page next to it.

What changed, and what did not

What changed is where the click goes. In a Pew Research Center study of 900 US adults' Google searches in March 2025, users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result in 8% of visits, against 15% for users who did not see one. They clicked a link inside the summary itself in only 1% of visits (Pew Research Center, 22 July 2025). That is US data, but the lesson applies here too: when the answer sits on the results page, fewer people visit any website, so being named inside the answer matters more, even though few readers click through from it.

What did not change is how you get into the answer. Google's own documentation on AI Overviews and AI Mode says: "There are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary." It adds that you do not need new machine-readable files, AI text files or special schema.org markup (Google Search Central, updated 10 December 2025). The page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet. That is the same bar as ordinary search.

How each AI engine finds your pages

Every AI assistant that cites sources has to fetch pages from somewhere. Most of them use a search index, either their own or a partner's, and each has a crawler you can allow or block by name in robots.txt.

OpenAI also runs ChatGPT-User, which fetches a page when a person asks ChatGPT to open it, and states that it "is not used to determine whether content may appear in Search" (OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers). Perplexity-User does the same job for Perplexity and, because a person asked for the page, generally ignores robots.txt (Perplexity, Perplexity crawlers).

A common reason a small business is invisible in ChatGPT search is not its content but a security setting. Many hosting plans and CDNs now offer a one-click "block AI bots" setting. Depending on how it is configured, it can block the search crawlers along with the training crawlers. Check it before you rewrite a single page.

Blocking AI training without leaving AI search

Some business owners want to be recommended by AI assistants but do not want their content used to train AI models. That is possible, because the training crawlers and the search crawlers have different names.

• GPTBot collects content for training OpenAI's models. Blocking it does not remove you from ChatGPT search, which uses OAI-SearchBot.
• Google-Extended controls whether content Google crawls may be used to train future Gemini models, and for grounding, which means supplying search results to Gemini at the moment it answers in the Gemini app and on Vertex AI. Google states that it "does not impact a site's inclusion in Google Search nor is it used as a ranking signal" (Google, common crawlers).

Blocking Google-Extended therefore keeps you in Google Search, AI Overviews and AI Mode, which are part of Search, but out of Gemini app answers. A robots.txt that allows AI search, declines AI training and accepts that trade looks like this:

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

User-agent: Google-Extended
Disallow: /

User-agent: *
Allow: /

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

We allow everything on jabbibi.com, training included, because we would rather be understood by every model than protect a marketing site. For a business whose content is the product, such as a course provider or a publisher, the split above is the sensible default. OpenAI notes that robots.txt changes take about 24 hours to reach its search systems (OpenAI).

The SEO foundations AI answers are built on

Because AI search retrieves from search indexes, the ordinary foundations decide whether you are in the running at all. For a small business in Singapore or Malaysia these are the ones that matter most.

One page per service, per place

A single "Services" page that lists everything you do gives a search engine, and an AI, nothing specific to quote. Give each service its own page, and give each location you serve its own page when the offer or the proof differs. "Pastry courses in Johor Bahru" and "weekend baking classes for Singaporeans in JB" are different searches with different customers, and each deserves a page that answers it directly.

Titles and descriptions that state the answer

Write each page title as the thing the customer searched for, with the place: "Aircon servicing in Tampines: prices and booking", not "Welcome to ABC Services". Keep titles near 60 characters and meta descriptions near 155, and put a concrete fact in the description, such as a price, a duration or a location.

Crawlable, fast, and readable without JavaScript

• Submit an XML sitemap in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Make sure the main text is in the HTML the server sends. Not every AI crawler runs JavaScript, so a page built entirely in the browser can look empty to some of them.
• Keep the page fast on a phone, which is where most of your customers will find you.
• Link related pages to each other with descriptive anchor text, so every important page is reachable in two or three clicks.

Your Google Business Profile

For anything with a shopfront or a service area, the Google Business Profile does more than any page on your site. Google says local results are mainly based on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. It also says that "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking", and that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up (Google Business Profile Help). Choose the most specific primary category, fill in services and opening hours, add real photos, and ask every customer, not only the happy ones, for a review in the same week you finish the job. Our Google Business Profile guide covers setup, verification and the review rules step by step.

Show who is behind the page

Google's guidance on helpful content asks whether it is "self-evident to your visitors who authored your content", and describes trust as the most important part of E-E-A-T, its shorthand for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust (Google Search Central). Put a named author on articles, an about page with real people, your registered business name and number, and a physical address or service area. In our experience, AI assistants favour the same kind of clearly attributed source when they choose what to repeat.

Writing passages an AI will quote

An AI answer engine does not quote a page. It quotes a passage: a paragraph, a table row or a list item that still makes sense when lifted out. We aim for paragraphs of 40 to 80 words. The GEO study tested nine ways of rewriting content and found that citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics worked best, improving visibility by 30% to 40% on the study's main measure. The tests ran on a research engine built on GPT-3.5, and were checked on Perplexity. Keyword stuffing, the oldest SEO trick, gave "little to no improvement" (Aggarwal et al., KDD 2024).

The same study found the effect was largest for pages that ranked lower. Websites ranked fifth in the search results gained 115.1% in visibility from citing sources, while the top-ranked website lost 30.3% on average. For a small business competing with bigger names, we think that is the most encouraging finding in GEO research so far.

Six rules for citable passages

1. Answer in the first sentence. Put the direct answer first and the explanation after. Every section of this article opens that way.
2. Make each paragraph stand alone. Name the subject instead of writing "it" or "this", because the paragraph may be read without the one before it.
3. Say where it applies. Start country-specific facts with "In Singapore," or "In Malaysia," so a quoted sentence cannot be applied to the wrong country.
4. Give numbers with units, currency and a date. A line such as "S$180 for a 3-hour class, as at September 2026" (an invented example) is quotable. "Affordable prices" is not.
5. Cite your source in the sentence. Link to the government page, the study or the regulator you relied on.
6. Use tables for comparisons. Prices, packages and "X vs Y" questions are easier for an AI to extract from a table than from prose.

A rewrite, before and after

Here is a typical paragraph from a small business services page, and a version an AI assistant can actually use. The business and its figures are made up for this example.

Before (fictional example): We are passionate about keeping you cool and offer a wide range of high-quality aircon services at affordable prices. Our experienced team will take care of everything. Contact us today to find out more!

After (fictional example): A chemical wash for one wall-mounted aircon unit costs S$80 with us in Tampines, as at September 2026, and takes about 90 minutes. We recommend one every 12 to 18 months for units that run daily, and a general service every 3 months in between. Bookings open 7 days ahead, and we cover all of Singapore's east side, from Pasir Ris to Bedok.

The second version answers what, where, how much, how long, how often and for whom. An assistant asked "how much is an aircon chemical wash in Tampines" can quote it whole, and name the business while doing so. It is the pattern we use when we rewrite service pages for clients.

Write the FAQ your customers actually ask

People ask AI assistants full questions, such as "is it worth driving to JB for a baking course" or "how much does aircon chemical wash cost in Singapore". A short FAQ at the end of each service page, with each answer in 40 to 80 words, matches that shape exactly. Take the questions from your WhatsApp enquiries and your sales calls, not from a keyword tool.

Structured data in 2026

Structured data is code, usually JSON-LD, that tells machines what a page is about: this is a business, here is its address, this is an article by this person. It still helps search engines understand your site, but two changes in the last three years mean it is no longer a shortcut to a prettier result.

• Google limited FAQ rich results to well-known government and health websites in 2023, then stopped showing them altogether on 7 May 2026 (Google Search Central, documentation updates).
• Google states that no special schema.org structured data is needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode.

What is still worth adding for a small business: Organization or LocalBusiness on the home page, with your address, phone number and links to your social profiles in sameAs; Article or BlogPosting with a named author on articles; BreadcrumbList on deeper pages; and Product or Course where they fit. Keep every value in the markup identical to what the page shows. Leaving existing FAQ markup in place does no harm, since other search engines may still read it.

Do you need an llms.txt file?

No, but it is cheap to add. An llms.txt file is a short Markdown file at the root of your site that summarises what the business does and links to its most important pages. It was proposed by Jeremy Howard in September 2024 "to provide information to help agents use a website" (llmstxt.org).

Be clear about what it does not do. Google says you do not need AI text files to appear in its AI features, and as at September 2026 no major AI search engine has publicly said it ranks or cites pages because of llms.txt. We publish one at jabbibi.com/llms.txt, generated automatically from our page titles and descriptions, because it takes minutes and helps AI agents that do read it. Spend an hour on it, not a week.

Being mentioned where AI looks

In our experience, AI assistants are more likely to recommend businesses they can find described consistently in several independent places. Your own website is one source. News articles, local directories, association member lists, review sites, forums and partners' websites are the others, and in our experience they count for more because you did not write them.

We used this approach for Pastry Art Academy, a pastry school in Johor Bahru. Instead of buying advertising, we offered local media and lifestyle sites a class experience rather than paying for placement, set up referral partnerships with education agents, and wrote course pages and articles with sections built to be quoted. The academy now gets new leads without spending on ads. None of that was a trick: it was ordinary public relations and partnerships, done with AI search in mind.

• Keep your business name, address and phone number identical everywhere: website, Google Business Profile, Facebook, directories.
• Get listed in the directories that matter in your trade, such as a professional body, a trade association or an industry marketplace.
• Answer questions honestly on forums and communities where your customers ask them, as a named person from the business.
• Offer something newsworthy to local media: a free workshop, a survey of your customers, a first in your area.

Singapore and Malaysia specifics

Most GEO advice is written for the US market. A few things work differently here.

In Singapore

In Singapore, many customers search in English, many also read Chinese, and some prefer to ask in it. If your customers include Mandarin speakers, a proper Chinese version of your key pages, linked to the English pages with hreflang tags, can surface you for questions asked in Chinese that English-only competitors never answer (Google, localized versions). Write prices in SGD with the S$ sign, and name the neighbourhood or MRT station you serve, because that is how people in Singapore phrase local questions.

In Malaysia

In Malaysia, customers switch between English, Bahasa Malaysia and Chinese, and search in all three. Decide which languages your customers actually use before translating, and translate the pages that sell, not every page. Write prices in ringgit with the RM sign, and be specific about the city and state, since "Johor Bahru", "JB" and "Iskandar Puteri" are all searched separately. A business that serves customers from both countries should have separate pages for each, with each page stating its currency and the practical details, such as the checkpoint or delivery area, for that side of the Causeway.

WhatsApp is the conversion, so track it

In both countries, in our experience, the enquiry from an AI answer usually arrives as a WhatsApp message, not a form. Put a WhatsApp button on every service page and track clicks on it as a key event in Google Analytics, or you will never know whether your visibility turned into customers. It is how we measure our own site.

Measuring AI visibility

AI visibility is harder to measure than rankings, but it is no longer invisible. Use these four sources together.

Add one more, the oldest one: ask every new customer how they found you, and record "ChatGPT" or "Google's AI answer" as its own option. In our experience it is often the only way to see AI recommendations that never produced a click.

A 30-day plan for a small business

This is the order we work in for clients. Each week builds on the one before, and none of it needs a paid tool.

What a lot of GEO advice gets wrong

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

GEO is not a new discipline for a small business to master. It is SEO done properly, with four additions.

• Let the AI search crawlers in. Check robots.txt and your host's bot blocker before anything else.
• Write passages that answer a question in their first sentence, name the place, and carry a number, a date and a source.
• Get described by others: reviews, local media, directories and partners, with your name and details identical everywhere.
• Measure it with Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and a monthly look at what the assistants say about you.

For more on running a business alone in the region, read our 2026 guide to one-person companies in Singapore and Malaysia, read our client success stories, or browse the blog.

Sources

Search engines and AI platforms

1. Google Search Central, AI features and your website, updated 10 December 2025, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
2. Google Search Central, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
3. Google Search Central, Overview of Google crawlers and fetchers (Google-Extended), retrieved 2026-09-19, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/google-common-crawlers
4. Google Search Central, Tell Google about localized versions of your page, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions
5. Google Search Central, Latest Google Search documentation updates (FAQ rich results, May 2026), retrieved 2026-09-19, https://developers.google.com/search/updates
6. Google Business Profile Help, Tips to improve your local ranking on Google, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091
7. OpenAI, Overview of OpenAI crawlers, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
8. OpenAI Help Center, Publishers and Developers FAQ, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://help.openai.com/en/articles/12627856-publishers-and-developers-faq
9. Perplexity, Perplexity crawlers, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://docs.perplexity.ai/guides/bots
10. Anthropic, Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler
11. Microsoft Bing Webmaster Blog, Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview, 10 February 2026, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/February-2026/Introducing-AI-Performance-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Public-Preview
12. Microsoft Bing Blog, New AI Visibility Insights in Bing Webmaster Tools: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, Compare, 16 June 2026, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://blogs.bing.com/search/June-2026/New-AI-Visibility-Insights-in-Bing-Webmaster-Tools-Intents-Topics-Citation-Share-Compare
13. IndexNow, Frequently asked questions, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://www.indexnow.org/faq
14. llmstxt.org, The /llms.txt file, Jeremy Howard, 3 September 2024, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://llmstxt.org/

Research and reporting

1. Aggarwal, P., Murahari, V., Rajpurohit, T., Kalyan, A., Narasimhan, K. and Deshpande, A., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
2. Pew Research Center, Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results, 22 July 2025, retrieved 2026-09-19, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-users-are-less-likely-to-click-on-links-when-an-ai-summary-appears-in-the-results/