What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
GEO is how you get recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. Here is what it means, how it differs from SEO, and where to start.
By Seoptist Team · · 3 min read
Ask ChatGPT for "a good emergency plumber in Bristol" and you get a short list of names, not ten blue links. The businesses on that list did not pay to be there and, in most cases, did not do anything deliberate to get there. Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of changing that: making your business the one that AI assistants find, understand and recommend.
A definition
GEO is the set of techniques that increase how often, how prominently and how accurately a brand appears in answers produced by generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini and AI Overviews, Perplexity, Claude and Microsoft Copilot.
The term comes from a 2023 research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues at Princeton and the Indian Institute of Technology, which tested which content changes made a source more likely to be cited by a generative engine. The headline finding still holds: content with clear statistics, quotations from credible sources and plain, well-structured explanations was cited far more often than content stuffed with keywords.
How GEO differs from SEO
Classic SEO optimises for a ranked list. The engine returns many results, and your job is to be near the top for queries with volume. GEO optimises for a synthesised answer. The engine reads several sources, decides which to trust, and writes a single response. There is usually room for three to five brands, and the engine explains why it chose them.
That shifts the emphasis in three ways.
First, entity clarity beats keyword density. An AI model needs to know, with confidence, who you are, where you operate, what you offer and who you serve. Ambiguity (two businesses with similar names, an address that differs between your site and your Google Business Profile, services described vaguely) is punished more harshly than in traditional search.
Second, citability matters. Engines with live retrieval (Perplexity, ChatGPT with search, Gemini, AI Overviews) quote and link sources. Pages that answer a specific question directly, in a form that can be lifted into a response, get cited. Pages that bury the answer under marketing copy do not.
Third, crawler access is a precondition. If your robots.txt blocks GPTBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot, those engines cannot read your pages at retrieval time and will fall back to older training data or to third-party sites describing you. Many sites block AI crawlers by accident through a wildcard rule added years ago.
What GEO is not
GEO is not a replacement for SEO. The models that power AI answers were trained largely on the same web that Google indexes, and the retrieval systems behind them lean heavily on conventional search results. A site with technical problems, thin content or poor performance has the same problems in both worlds. Think of GEO as an extension of SEO with different measurement and a few new requirements, not a separate discipline.
GEO is also not prompt injection or hidden text aimed at models. Those tricks are detected, do not survive model updates, and damage trust. Everything that works in GEO is also good for human readers.
How to measure it
You cannot optimise what you do not measure, and GEO measurement is genuinely new. The method Seoptist uses is simple to describe:
- Define the prompts your customers actually type, for example "best family dentist in Leicester" or "accounting software for UK sole traders".
- Put those prompts to each engine through its official API, several times, because answers vary.
- Record whether you are mentioned, in what position, with what sentiment, and which sources were cited.
- Repeat weekly and chart the trend, per engine and against competitors.
From that you get a visibility score and share of voice, the GEO equivalents of rankings and market share.
Where to start
If you do one thing this week, check whether AI crawlers can reach your site and fix your robots.txt. If you do three things, add Organization or LocalBusiness structured data with consistent name, address and phone number, and rewrite your main service pages so the first paragraph answers the question a customer would ask. Then set up tracking so you can see whether it worked.
The free Seoptist AI Visibility Check will show you where you stand today across five prompts and two engines. It takes two minutes and does not need a card.