GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the set of techniques that help AI answer engines, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI overviews, find a website's content, understand it and cite or recommend it in their answers.
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It is the work of making sure that when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Copilot “which company do you recommend for…?”, the answer mentions you and links to your site. The term gained traction after a 2023 academic paper that studied how to influence visibility inside AI-generated answers.
Why does GEO matter?
More people run their searches in AI assistants, or read the AI overview Google shows above the results. In those cases, the user gets a written answer with few cited sources. If your company is not among them, it does not exist for that search, even if your page ranks well in the classic list.
These searches also tend to be longer and more specific (“employment lawyer in Manchester who takes cases on a fixed fee”). The person asking is often close to deciding.
How does a generative engine work?
Most assistants with search follow a similar process: they rephrase the question, run several searches on the web or in their index, read the best-placed pages and write an answer using fragments of them. For your site to enter that process, it must meet three conditions:
- The crawler can read it: do not block GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot in
robots.txt, and serve content in HTML without depending on JavaScript. - The model understands it: clear structure, one H1, headings that answer questions, structured data (JSON-LD) and, as a complement, an llms.txt file.
- It deserves to be cited: direct answers in the first sentence, concrete data, prices, comparisons and clear authorship.
What does a business use GEO for?
A business works on GEO to appear in the questions its customers ask before buying:
- Recommendations: “best accountant for freelancers in Leeds”, “booking software for restaurants”.
- Comparisons: “difference between X and Y”, where the assistant chooses which brands to name.
- Price questions: “how much does a bathroom remodel cost”, where a page with clear ranges has a good chance of being cited.
- Technical questions in the industry, which position the company as a reference.
Example: a law firm
Picture an employment law firm with a good-looking but very visual site: text inside images, a single paragraph per service and everything loaded with JavaScript. It shows up on Google for its own name, but no assistant mentions it when someone asks for employment lawyers in its city.
The firm rebuilds its service pages. Each one opens by answering the main question (for example, what compensation applies to an unfair dismissal and what it depends on), adds real FAQs with answers, publishes indicative fees and marks up the data with JSON-LD. It reviews robots.txt, which was blocking several AI crawlers, and publishes an llms.txt. Then it tracks every month which questions it appears in.
GEO and SEO: do you have to choose?
No. GEO builds on technical SEO: if Google cannot crawl your site, assistants will not read it either. What changes is the content approach, which moves from “rank for a keyword” to “be the best citable answer to a question”.
You can see where your site stands with our AI visibility checker, which reviews the technical points in a minute. If you want to work on it continuously, we do it in our generative engine optimization service.