What is generative engine optimization?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the work of making your business one of the sources that AI engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Mode cite or recommend when they write an answer. Instead of competing for a position on a results page, you are competing to be trusted enough to be named inside the response.
Think about how a buyer uses these tools now. “Which CRM is best for a five-person sales team?” “Who does local SEO for restaurants in Dubai?” “Is it worth hiring an SEO freelancer or an agency?” The engine answers in three paragraphs and names two or three options. If you are not one of them, the buyer never sees you.
How GEO differs from SEO and AEO
- SEO earns a listing on a results page. The reader chooses whom to click.
- AEO earns the direct answer to a specific question: a snippet, a voice reply, an AI Overview line.
- GEO earns a mention inside a synthesised answer, where the engine has combined many sources and decided which businesses are worth naming.
The foundations are shared. What changes with GEO is how much weight the engine gives to what other sites say about you, and how consistently you describe yourself everywhere.
How generative engines pick their sources
Every engine is different under the hood, but they converge on the same behaviour:
- They retrieve, then write. Most engines now search the live web for your question, read a handful of pages, and write the answer from those. Being retrievable for the question is step one. That is classic SEO.
- They prefer sources that agree with each other. If your site says you are an SEO consultant and your LinkedIn, Upwork profile, directory listings and a few third-party mentions say the same, the model is confident. If the facts drift, you get skipped.
- They prefer plain claims. “We serve dental practices across the UK, from £900 a month” is usable. “Bespoke solutions for ambitious brands” is noise.
- They lean on trusted intermediaries. Review platforms, industry directories, well-known publications, Reddit and Quora threads, comparison sites. Being present there, accurately, is a large part of the job.
The 12-point GEO checklist
- Write one plain-language description of your business and use it everywhere. Who you are, what you do, for whom, where. Same wording on your site, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, Upwork, directories.
- Give every service its own page with a definition at the top. The first paragraph should read like an encyclopedia entry for that service, then get specific about how you deliver it.
- Publish numbers. Prices or price ranges, timelines, results with context. Engines quote specifics and skip adjectives.
- Add an About page that reads like a bio, not a mission statement. Name, credentials, years, locations served, notable clients if you can name them, a photo.
- Mark up the obvious. Organization or Person, Service, FAQPage, Article, LocalBusiness where relevant. Schema does not make bad content good, but it removes ambiguity.
- Get listed where the models already look. Clutch, G2, Trustpilot, Google Business Profile, industry associations, Crunchbase for startups, local chambers. Fill every field.
- Collect reviews that mention what you did. “Rakesh moved our map ranking from position 9 to 2 in four months” teaches the model far more than “great to work with”.
- Earn a few genuine third-party mentions. A guest article, a podcast appearance, a quote in a trade publication, a case study on a partner’s site. Three good ones beat thirty directory links.
- Answer real questions in public. Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, niche forums. Engines read these threads. Be useful, sign with your name, do not pitch.
- Publish original data or opinion. A small survey, a benchmark from your own client work, a clearly argued point of view. Models cite sources that add something new.
- Keep pages current. Update the year in titles where it is honest to do so, refresh the numbers, show a last-updated date. Stale pages are deprioritised.
- Let the crawlers in. Check robots.txt does not block GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended or CCBot. Many sites block them by accident through a security plugin.
A worked example
Composite example: details changed, numbers typical of what I see rather than one named client.
An accountancy firm in Manchester with three partners asks ChatGPT and Perplexity “who is a good accountant for contractors in Manchester” and does not appear. The firms that do appear share three things: a Google Business Profile with 60+ reviews that mention “contractor” and “IR35”, a services page that says “accountants for contractors and freelancers in Greater Manchester, from £95 a month”, and mentions on two industry directories and one local business news site. The firm rewrites its services page in that plain style, adds a “for contractors” page with real prices, asks its next 30 contractor clients for reviews that mention the work, and gets listed on the two directories. Ten weeks later it is named in Perplexity’s answer and appears in ChatGPT’s list two out of five times. Nothing clever happened; the firm became easy to verify.
What this means for you
- Local service business: reviews that describe the job and the area, plus a plain services page with prices, do most of the work. Directories the engines already read do the rest.
- E-commerce: the engines name products from sites with clear specifications, honest reviews and accurate stock and price data. Feed them structured product data and keep it current.
- B2B or SaaS: comparison pages, listings on G2 and Capterra, and third-party mentions decide whether you make the shortlist an assistant produces.
How to check whether it is working
There is no rank tracker for this yet that I fully trust, so do it by hand:
- Write down 10 to 20 questions a buyer would ask before hiring someone like you. Include the local variants.
- Once a month, ask each question in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google AI Mode. Log which businesses are named and which pages are cited.
- Track it in a simple sheet. You are looking for the month you first appear, and then for consistency.
- Check your analytics for referrals from the AI domains. They are small but they convert well, because the visitor arrives pre-sold.
The mistakes I see most often
- Describing the business differently on every platform. The model cannot tell if it is one company or three.
- Hiding pricing. If you will not say a number, the engine quotes the competitor who does.
- Publishing “AI content about AI search”. Generic articles with no first-hand detail do not get cited. Your own experience does.
- Blocking the crawlers and then wondering why you never appear.
Where this fits with the rest of your marketing
GEO is not a separate project. It is the same work as good SEO, done with more discipline about facts and more attention to what the rest of the web says about you. If your site is in decent shape, the checklist above is a few weeks of focused effort. If it is not, start with the basics, technical and on-page, and put GEO on top once they are solid.
Want to know where you stand today? Ask the engines the questions your buyers ask, with your business name in the prompt, and write down what comes back. That first list is your plan.