GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is the practice of structuring your content so that AI tools reference it when they answer a question. Where traditional SEO tries to win a position on a results page, GEO tries to make your site one of the sources an AI draws on when it writes its answer. The tools in question are the ones people increasingly ask instead of searching: ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude.
That is the whole idea. The rest of this page explains how it works, how much of it is genuinely new, and what actually makes a difference. We will be straight with you throughout, including about the parts of GEO that are overstated.
Why anyone is talking about this
People are starting to ask an AI the question they used to type into Google. When they do, they often get an answer without clicking anything. The AI reads a handful of sources, writes a reply in its own words, and sometimes names where the information came from.
If your business is one of those named sources, you have reached someone who was researching a decision, and you have done it with the AI’s implied endorsement. If you are not, you are invisible on that surface, no matter how well you rank on Google.
That is the opportunity and the risk in one sentence. GEO is the work of being one of the sources rather than none of them.
The name is a mess, and that is worth knowing
You will see this idea called several things. GEO is the most common. You will also see AEO (answer engine optimisation), AIO, LLMO, and a few others. They mostly describe the same work.
The term generative engine optimisation comes from a 2023 academic paper, not from a marketing department, which is unusual and slightly reassuring. Since then the label has been pulled in different directions by everyone selling a tool for it.
Our advice is not to get attached to the acronym. The names will keep shifting. The underlying question does not: when an AI answers something in your field, does it mention you? Optimise for that, and you are covered whichever label wins.
How an AI decides what to cite
To do GEO well it helps to know, in plain terms, what happens when someone asks an AI a question. It is less mysterious than it sounds.
Most AI search tools do not simply invent an answer from memory. They search the live web first, read what they find, and write a reply based on it. The technical name for this is retrieval-augmented generation, but the idea is simple: retrieve some pages, then generate an answer from them.
Two things about that process matter for you:
First, the AI usually breaks the question into several smaller searches rather than one. Ask it for the best CRM for a small recruitment agency and it may silently search for small business CRMs, CRMs for recruiters, and CRM pricing, then combine what it finds. So the page that gets cited is often the one that cleanly answers a narrow sub-question, not the one targeting the big obvious phrase.
Second, the AI does not copy your page. It reads it, extracts the part that answers the question, and rewrites it. That rewrite is where citations are won or lost. A page that states its answer plainly and early is easy to extract. A page that buries the answer under a thousand words of preamble is not.
Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
This is the honest question, and it deserves an honest answer: mostly, but not entirely.
In May 2026, Google published its first official guidance on optimising for its AI features. Its position was blunt. Optimising for AI search, it said, is still SEO. The pages that AI tools cite tend to be the pages that were already crawlable, fast, trustworthy and useful. If your SEO foundations are weak, no amount of GEO tactics will rescue you, because the AI is drawing from the same web everyone else is.
So the foundation is unchanged. A site that cannot be crawled, that loads slowly, or that no one trusts will struggle in AI answers for the same reasons it struggles in search.
What GEO adds on top is a shift in emphasis. Answering questions directly matters more than it used to, because extraction rewards clarity. Being mentioned on sites the AI already trusts matters more, because these systems lean heavily on third-party sources rather than your own marketing copy. And the way you measure success changes, because a citation can influence someone who never visits your site at all.
That is the real state of things. GEO is not a separate discipline you bolt on. It is SEO done well, with a few new habits, aimed at a new surface. Anyone selling it as a revolution that makes your existing SEO obsolete is overselling.
What actually makes a page citeable
There is no trick, and the specifics deserve their own guide. But the principles are consistent and none of them are exotic.
Answer the question early. Say the useful thing in the first paragraph, then expand. This helps the AI extract you, and it happens to help human readers too.
Be specific and verifiable. AI tools favour content with concrete facts, figures and clear claims over vague, hedging prose. If you can cite a real number or a dated source, do.
Earn mentions elsewhere. A large share of what AI tools cite is earned coverage, not a brand’s own website. Being referenced by a publication, a directory or an industry site raises your odds more than another page on your own blog does.
Demonstrate genuine expertise. These systems are built to favour content that shows real experience and authority. For a business, that means content written by people who actually do the work, not generic copy assembled to fill a page.
Keep it readable. It is possible to over-structure content for machines, with endless bullet points and robotic phrasing, to the point where a human bounces off it. That is self-defeating, because a page no one wants to read earns no links or trust, and links and trust are what get you cited. Write for the person first.
How you measure whether it is working
This is the part most people skip and it is the part that decides whether the effort was worth it.
Traditional rankings only tell you part of the story now, because a citation can do its job without a click. So you measure a few things alongside your usual reporting.
Watch for referral traffic from AI tools in your analytics. It is usually small at first, often zero, which is exactly why recording the starting point matters. Track whether your brand appears when you ask AI tools the questions your customers would ask. And keep an eye on branded searches, since people often see you in an AI answer and then look you up directly.
None of this is instant. Building the kind of authority AI tools reward takes months, in the same way ranking does. Anyone promising faster is selling something.
Where to start
If you are doing SEO properly already, you are most of the way there. The additional work is a shift in habit: answer questions directly, prove your expertise, earn mentions on sites that matter and measure the new surface as well as the old one.
If your SEO foundations are shaky, start there, because GEO built on weak foundations does not hold.
We work on both, together, because for most businesses they are the same project. If you want to talk through where your site stands, our SEO and GEO service page explains how we approach it, or you can get in touch directly.