What is generative engine optimisation?
Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the work of making your business easy for AI tools to find, understand and recommend. It is to ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude and Google’s AI Mode what SEO is to Google’s ordinary results. You may also see it called AI search optimisation or answer engine optimisation (AEO).
How do AI tools decide which businesses to name?
Two ways, and they move at very different speeds.
- Live search. Many AI tools search the web while they answer, read a handful of pages and summarise them. You appear if you are on one of those pages, which is often a directory, a roundup, a Business Profile or a review site rather than your own homepage. This is the part you can influence in weeks.
- What the model already knows. Facts learned during training. Slow to change and largely outside your control, though it improves as the web says more accurate things about you.
Is GEO different from SEO?
Less than the marketing suggests. Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same foundations as ordinary search: pages it can crawl and index, good page experience, important content in text, and structured data that matches the page. It says there are no extra requirements and no special files or schema to add.
Where GEO adds something is in emphasis: answering specific questions plainly, keeping your facts identical everywhere, and being present on the other websites AI tools read.
What actually works?
From our own test of 222 AI answers, four things decided who got named: consistent facts everywhere, a page that answers the exact question, a complete Google Business Profile, and proof from other websites. Specific pages beat general ones, and published prices were quoted word for word. Read the full findings.
What doesn’t work?
- Tricks made only for AI. Hidden text, keyword stuffing and pages written for machines rather than people.
- Relying on llms.txt. Harmless to publish, but Google says you do not need new machine readable files for its AI features.
- Blocking AI crawlers by accident. Some hosting and security settings can block AI crawlers. Check your robots.txt and any CDN or firewall settings.
- Fake or bought reviews. They are against UK consumer law, and in our test AI tools were already sceptical of praise a business published about itself.
How do you measure GEO?
Pick the questions your buyers ask, put them to each AI tool in a fresh chat with memory off, and record who gets named and which sources are used. Repeat the same questions every 30 to 90 days. In Google Analytics, watch for visits from chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com and gemini.google.com, and in Search Console, AI Overviews and AI Mode traffic appears in the Performance report.
What does GEO cost?
You can start for free: our AI visibility check asks four AI tools eight questions about your business. The full AI Search Visibility Audit is £395, and ongoing AI search work is part of our SEO plans, from £150 a month.