What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) means adapting your content so that AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity mention and cite your brand when someone asks a question. SEO helps your site become visible in Google; GEO gets you into the AI's answer itself.
More and more people ask an AI assistant their question first. They simply ask ChatGPT or Perplexity “which company can help me with this?” and get a short answer with a few names. If your organisation is not among them, you simply do not exist for that customer. GEO is about making sure you are there.
How an AI assistant uses your content
An AI assistant reaches your content in two ways. The first is training material: what the model has learned, including your brand if enough reliable sources refer to you. The second is a retrieval layer that reads live pages during the conversation and cites them. In both cases, the model interprets and summarises your content. It extracts the answer instead of simply showing a blue link.
Why this is separate from traditional SEO
GEO and SEO overlap, but they are not the same. For Google, links and keywords matter most. For an AI answer, what matters is whether your content has authority and whether it is written clearly enough for a model to extract an answer it can cite directly. As a result, a page that appears nowhere in Google can still turn up in AI answers, and vice versa.
What you can do about it
The foundation is content an AI can easily use: a clear answer at the top, self-contained facts and figures that can be cited, comparisons in tables, and frequently asked questions that reflect how people actually ask. Beyond that, you need the technical side (such as an llms.txt file and clean, readable pages for AI crawlers) and authority: whether you are mentioned in places the model trusts. Our Marketing & Branding service helps with that, and in this article we go into the approach in more detail.
Is GEO the same as SEO?
They overlap, but the mechanics differ. SEO is about becoming visible in Google. GEO is about being mentioned and cited in an AI assistant's answer. Some of the pages AI systems cite do not even rank in Google, so it is a separate layer of discoverability that you need to address separately.
Does schema markup work for GEO?
To a limited extent. In large-scale analyses, schema markup has barely any measurable effect on whether an AI cites your content. It remains useful as basic housekeeping, but it is not a button that buys you AI citations. Clear, well-structured content that can be cited matters more.
How do you measure whether GEO works?
Ask the buyer questions that matter to you across the different AI engines and see whether your organisation appears: absent, mentioned, or cited with a link. Repeat this at regular intervals and track whether your position and the competitors mentioned change.
A note on how this was made: our content is AI-assisted. We use AI for research and drafting a first concept. A human reviews and edits the text and takes responsibility for everything we publish. Read how we make our content.
Wondering what this means for your business?
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