What Is GEO? Generative Engine Optimisation Explained

GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is the work that gets your organisation mentioned, described accurately and recommended in answers written by AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini and Google’s AI Mode. Traditional SEO earns a place in a list of links. GEO earns a place inside the answer itself, where the AI names a few organisations and the reader often goes no further.

The term comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi. They tested what made a source more likely to appear in AI-generated answers and found that adding citations, quotations from relevant sources and statistics improved visibility substantially, by up to around 40% in their tests, while keyword stuffing did little. The name stuck, and so did the finding: AI engines reward content that is specific, evidenced and easy to quote.

Why GEO matters now

Ask ChatGPT “who are the best web agencies for professional bodies in the UK?” and it will not give you ten blue links. It will give you a short paragraph naming three or four organisations, with a sentence about each. If you are not one of them, you were not in the running.

That is happening across every sector. People ask AI assistants for solicitors, accountants, training providers, software, suppliers and agencies. The assistants answer with confidence, and buyers increasingly take the shortlist they are given. GEO is how you get on it.

How generative engines choose who to recommend

There are two routes into an AI answer, and GEO has to work on both.

Retrieval. Many AI tools search the web before they answer. ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Copilot and Google’s AI features all fetch pages, read them and cite them. Here, classic SEO matters a lot: if your pages rank, load, and answer clearly, they are more likely to be fetched and quoted.

Memory. Language models also answer from what they learned in training. What they “know” about your organisation comes from everything written about it: your website, directories, reviews, news coverage, comparison articles, LinkedIn, case studies on clients’ sites. If those sources describe you consistently and often, the model has something to say. If they are thin or contradictory, it says nothing, or gets it wrong.

What GEO work involves

An AI visibility audit

Start by finding out where you stand. Write a fixed set of prompts your buyers would use, such as “best AI agency in the UK for professional services” or “who builds Umbraco websites for membership bodies”, and run them through the main assistants. Record whether you appear, what is said, which sources are cited, and who is named instead. That becomes your baseline. We cover the method in how to measure AI search visibility.

Entity consistency

An “entity” is just a clearly defined thing: your organisation, with a name, a location, services, people and credentials. AI systems are more confident about entities that every source describes the same way. Check that your name, address, services, prices, founding date and leadership read the same on your site, Google Business Profile, Companies House, LinkedIn, directories and review platforms. Organization schema on your site, with sameAs links to your official profiles, ties it together.

A machine-readable website

Make your site easy for AI tools to read and quote:

• Service pages that say plainly what you do, for whom, where and at what price.
• Self-contained paragraphs that still make sense when lifted out of the page.
• Structured data for your organisation, services, reviews and FAQs.
• An llms.txt file summarising the site for AI tools.
• Robots rules that let in the AI crawlers you want, such as OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot.

Third-party proof

This is the part most organisations skip and the part that moves memory-based answers. AI tools trust what others say about you more than what you say about yourself. Earn mentions in sector directories, trade press, “best of” comparison articles, partner and client websites, podcasts and reviews. A case study published on a client’s site, naming you, is worth more to GEO than another page on your own.

Tracking

Run the same prompts every month. Report your share of mentions against named competitors, how accurately you are described, and the visits AI tools send. Without this, GEO is guesswork.

GEO vs SEO vs AEO

• SEO ranks your pages in the list of links.
• AEO makes a page the direct answer to a question. See what is AEO.
• GEO gets your organisation named and recommended in AI-written answers.

They share foundations. A site with poor SEO rarely does well in AI answers, because the retrieval route depends on it. But GEO adds work SEO never covered: entity clean-up, third-party mentions in the sources models trust, and prompt tracking. We set out the differences in detail in GEO vs SEO.

Where to start

Open ChatGPT and Perplexity and ask each one to recommend a provider of your main service in your area. If you are named, check the description is right. If a competitor is named instead, look at what is written about them that is not written about you. That gap is your GEO plan.

Our GEO service does that audit properly, fixes the gaps and tracks the result every month, alongside AEO and SEO in one retainer.