Customers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google AI Overviews who to hire and where to buy. GEO is the work of making those systems understand your business accurately, so it's more likely to be the one they name.
Pick a question, then switch between what assistants say today and what they say once your business is readable to them. Sample answers.
Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the work of making a business understandable and citable by AI assistants, so that it is named in the answer rather than ranked in a list.
It covers four things, three of them on your own site and one of them not. The systems it targets are ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode.
The distinction that matters is between being ranked and being named. A results page shows ten businesses, and sixth place still earns some clicks. An assistant names two or three and stops. There is no sixth place.
It is not a setting, a plugin or a submission. Nobody can place a business inside an assistant's answer, and an agency that says otherwise is describing something it cannot deliver. It is also not separate from SEO. The technical foundation and most of the content work are shared, which is why the two are best run as one project rather than bought twice.
Businesses where a customer asks for a recommendation before they buy, and where the decision is considered rather than impulsive. Medical and dental practices, law firms, and considered-purchase e-commerce fit that shape. A business competing purely on price in a category nobody asks an assistant about does not.
Three overlapping disciplines that are often sold as one. Answer engine optimization, AEO, targets the direct answer box above the results. GEO targets the generated answer that replaces the results.
| What is being compared | SEO | AEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|---|
| You compete for | A position among ten links | The one answer box above the results | Being named inside a generated answer |
| Where it shows | The results page | Featured snippet, People Also Ask, voice | ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, AI Overviews |
| Winning looks like | Top three | Owning the box | Cited by name |
| If you nearly win | Position six still gets clicks | Position one gets what the box leaves | Nothing |
| What it runs on | Relevance, links, technical health | Clear question and answer structure | Machine-readable identity, liftable statements, third-party corroboration |
| Source material | Your site, mostly | Your site | Your site, plus directories, reviews, roundups and listings |
| How it is measured | Rankings, clicks, impressions | Snippet ownership | Prompt tracking, plus AI Overview impressions in Search Console |
Look at the last three rows. What each discipline runs on, where its source material comes from and how it is measured all start in the same place: a site that states plainly what the business is. That is why we do not sell GEO as a separate retainer bolted onto an SEO contract.
Want to see whether your site gives an assistant enough to work with?
Get a free inspectionThree things change once the answer arrives as a sentence instead of a list.
A results page gives ten businesses a chance. An assistant typically names a handful and stops. Position six on Google still gets seen occasionally; not being named at all gets seen never. The gap between being included and being left out is much sharper than a ranking drop.
Assistants build answers from directories, review sites, roundups and industry lists as much as from your own site. Your website is one input among many, and an out-of-date profile somewhere else can contradict it.
A business can be well regarded, well reviewed and still never named, because nothing on its site states plainly what it does, for whom, and in which city. A human reads around that ambiguity. A machine does not, and an assistant with an incomplete picture reaches for a business it can describe confidently instead.
Five areas, in the order they usually need attention.
Structured data is how a site states, unambiguously, what kind of business this is, which services it offers, where it operates and who stands behind it. We write it properly for the organisation, each service and each location, and keep it consistent with what the pages actually say.
Markup that contradicts the page is worth fixing on its own terms. It is not why an assistant skips you.
Assistants lift short, self-contained statements that answer a question completely. We rewrite the pages that matter so each section answers one real question in a form that can be lifted whole.
Assistants weight content that can be attributed to an identifiable expert, and so do the people reading it. That means author profiles with real credentials, content credited to the person who actually knows the subject, and consistency between what your site says about them and what the rest of the web does.
We find the directories, review platforms, association listings and roundups that actually get cited for your category and city, then make sure you appear on them with details that match your site exactly. A phone number that disagrees across three sources is a reason for an assistant to choose someone else.
This overlaps with local SEO, which is why the two are managed together.
Details that disagree are a reason to pick someone else.
We keep a fixed set of prompts, the ones your customers would really type, and run them across the major assistants every month. You see which named you, which named a competitor, and whether what they said about you was accurate.
Since August 2026 Google also reports how often your pages were shown in AI Overviews and AI Mode, so the monthly report carries your own impression data next to the prompt results. The two answer different questions: one is whether Google showed you, the other is whether an assistant named you.
Same prompts every month, so the trend means something. Sample figures.
Month to month, like everything else we do. No separate AI retainer on top of an SEO contract.
What is not included: any promise about placement. See the guarantee question below.
Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the work of making a business understandable and citable by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews. It covers structured data, answer-shaped content, named expertise, and presence on the sources those systems draw from. The goal is to be named in the answer rather than ranked in a list.
They share a technical foundation and most of the same content work, so they're best managed together. The difference is the target. SEO competes for a position among ten results, where sixth place still gets some clicks. GEO competes to be one of the two or three businesses named in a single answer, where there's no consolation prize for nearly making it.
No. Nobody controls what an assistant says, the models change without notice, and anyone promising placement is describing something they can't deliver. What we can do is remove the reasons you're currently being skipped, then show you month by month whether the picture is changing.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews, using a fixed set of prompts drawn from the questions your customers actually ask. The list is agreed with you at the start so the month-to-month comparison is honest.
Usually they're the same project. The structured data, the clear service descriptions and the accurate listings all help both. If your site has a serious technical problem, that gets fixed first either way, because neither search engines nor assistants can use what they can't read.
No. Assistants are built on top of search, not instead of it, and most of them cite pages that rank. A site that has been abandoned by its SEO is not a strong candidate for citation either. What has changed is that ranking is no longer sufficient on its own, because an answer can be delivered without the visit. Treat GEO as an extension of the same work, not a replacement for it.
Yes, with a caveat worth stating plainly. Impressions are increasingly being served without a click, so the old assumption that better rankings mean proportionally more traffic no longer holds. That makes measurement more important, not less: if you cannot trace enquiries back to their source, you cannot tell a channel that is working from one that has quietly stopped.
Ask three questions. What is the fixed prompt set, and who agreed it? What did the baseline look like before any work started? And what happens to the accounts and data if the engagement ends? An agency that cannot show a before-state is describing intentions rather than results. An agency that guarantees placement is describing something nobody controls.
It is part of a month-to-month engagement rather than a separate line item, and the figure depends on how many pages and locations need work. We quote after the free audit, when we can see the actual state of the site rather than guessing at it. There is no minimum term.
The structured data and content work can be done in weeks. Whether an assistant starts naming you is a different question, because models are retrained on their own schedules and citations come partly from third-party sources that update slowly. The honest answer is that the first month sets a baseline, and the trend is readable after three. Anyone offering a date is guessing.
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