GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is the practice of making your company the answer when someone asks an AI assistant about your category. It matters because a growing share of B2B research now starts in ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity or Google's AI results instead of a traditional search page. When a buyer asks "best CRM for logistics companies" or "top compliance platforms in the EU", the assistant names three to five companies. Either you are one of them or you do not exist for that buyer.
This is not a dark art and it is not traditional SEO with a new name, although the two overlap. Here is how it works and what to do, in the order we would do it.
How AI assistants choose who to cite
Assistants build answers from two layers: what is in their training data, and what they retrieve live from the web when they search. You influence both the same way, through content that is easy to find, easy to parse and safe to repeat.
In practice, models favour sources that state facts plainly, are corroborated across multiple independent places, and come from pages that look authoritative: official company sites, credible media, industry databases, comparison pages, communities. They avoid repeating claims that appear only once, only on your own site, in vague language.
That leads to the core principle of GEO: be quotable, and be corroborated.
The eight things that actually move the needle
1. Answer real questions in plain declarative sentences. "Acme is a compliance platform for EU fintechs, founded in 2019, used by 300 companies" is quotable. "Acme reimagines the compliance journey" is not. Audit your site for sentences a machine could safely repeat.
2. Publish an FAQ on every important page, with schema. FAQPage markup gives assistants clean question-and-answer pairs. Write the questions the way buyers ask them, not the way your product team names features.
3. Maintain your entity footprint. Consistent name, description and facts across your site, LinkedIn, Crunchbase, industry directories and Wikipedia-adjacent sources. Inconsistency reads as uncertainty, and uncertain facts do not get repeated.
4. Get named in comparison and list content. "Best X for Y" articles, analyst roundups, community threads. Assistants lean heavily on third-party lists precisely because they are corroboration. Earned media does double duty here: coverage is both PR and GEO.
5. Publish original numbers. Benchmarks, indexes, surveys. Models love citing statistics, and the source of a statistic gets named. One good annual benchmark can out-perform fifty blog posts.
6. Keep technical hygiene. Fast, crawlable pages; clean sitemap; robots.txt that allows GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot; llms.txt describing who you are; key facts in text rather than trapped in images or JavaScript.
7. Write category-defining explainers. The page that best explains "what is X category and who are the main players" tends to become the assistant's source for that category. Write it before your competitor does, and be fair about naming others: fairness makes the page citable.
8. Measure it. Ask the major assistants your buyers' questions monthly, log who gets named, and track your share of mentions like you track rankings. It is crude, but it is the metric that matters.
What does not work
Stuffing "AI" into your copy. Publishing fifty thin AI-written posts. Trying to prompt-inject assistants with hidden text: models increasingly detect it and it torches trust if discovered. And pure advertising spend: you cannot currently buy your way into an organic AI answer, which is exactly why showing up in one is worth so much.
How GEO and SEO fit together
Everything above helps traditional search too, and strong classic SEO (authority, links, crawlability) feeds GEO. Treat them as one discipline with two output surfaces. The practical difference: SEO optimises to be ranked, GEO optimises to be quoted. Rankings reward keywords; quotes reward clear, corroborated facts.
We build GEO programmes as part of AI-powered growth engagements, from entity audit to measurement.
Frequently asked questions
What does GEO stand for?
Generative engine optimisation: making your company visible and citable in answers generated by AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Google's AI results.
Is GEO different from SEO?
They overlap heavily. SEO earns rankings on search results pages; GEO earns mentions inside AI-generated answers. Clear facts, third-party corroboration and technical hygiene drive both.
How long does GEO take to work?
Retrieval-driven mentions can move in weeks once content and entity signals are fixed. Training-data presence compounds over months. Treat it as a programme, not a campaign.
Can you pay to appear in AI answers?
Not in organic answers today. Presence is earned through content, corroboration and coverage, which is why early movers build a durable advantage.
How do I measure AI visibility?
Ask the main assistants your buyers' top questions on a schedule, record which brands are named, and track your share of mentions over time alongside citation sources.