Glossary
GEO
In short: Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of making a brand more likely to be found, understood and recommended by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the set of techniques that increase how often, how prominently and how accurately a business appears in answers written by generative AI systems. Where classic SEO targets a ranked list of links, GEO targets a synthesised answer that usually has room for only three to five names.
The term comes from a 2023 academic paper that tested which content changes made a source more likely to be cited by a generative engine. Clear statistics, quotations from credible sources and plainly structured explanations performed well; keyword stuffing did not.
In practice GEO comes down to three things:
- Access: AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot must be able to read your pages.
- Entity clarity: name, address, services and prices must be consistent across your site, structured data and third-party directories.
- Citability: pages must answer specific questions in a form a model can lift into a response.
GEO is an extension of SEO rather than a replacement for it. The models were trained on the same web Google indexes and their retrieval systems lean on conventional search. Seoptist's audit scores GEO readiness alongside technical SEO and puts every finding into one prioritised checklist.