---
title: What is Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)? An explanation for SMEs
description: What is GEO? Find out how you adapt content for AI answer engines
  such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, alongside traditional SEO.
lang: en
canonical: https://www.en-twine.ai/en/what-is/geo/
updated: 2026-10-02T17:19:37.000Z
---
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](/en/services/marketing/) helps with that, and in [this article](/en/blog/generative-engine-optimization-business-services/) we go into the approach in more detail.