Generative Engine Optimisation — GEO — is the practice of getting your business named, cited and recommended by generative AI engines like ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity and Gemini. If SEO is about ranking in the list of links, GEO is about being inside the answer that increasingly sits above that list.
Why it suddenly matters
A growing share of people now ask an AI for recommendations rather than scrolling search results. They ask "who's the best [service] near me?" and act on the names the AI gives back. If your business isn't one of them, you're invisible to that buyer — and they never saw a results page you could have ranked on.
How GEO works
Language models build answers from content they can parse, sources they trust, and entities they understand. GEO earns all three:
The three levers
- →Content — structured as clear, factual, quotable answers
- →Entities — an unambiguous picture of who you are, what you do and where
- →Citations — authoritative third-party mentions the AI leans on
Is it worth doing now?
Yes — precisely because it's early. AI engines tend to name a small, consistent set of sources per query, and once you're one of them you're hard to displace. The businesses establishing that position now will hold it as AI search grows.
Where to start
Start with an audit of what the major AI engines currently say about you and your competitors. That tells you whether you're mentioned at all and where the gaps are. See our AI SEO service for how we run it.
