GEO — Generative Engine Optimization

Generative Engine Optimization is the practice of structuring content so that AI assistants cite your brand when answering questions in your category. Unlike SEO, which competes for a ranked position, GEO competes for inclusion inside a single synthesised answer — which rewards extractable phrasing, verifiable facts, and clear entity signals over keyword placement.

SEO earns a position in a list of ten links where the user chooses. GEO earns a mention inside one generated answer where the model chooses. The technical foundation overlaps, but GEO weights self-contained answer passages, statistics with attribution, and consistent entity data far more heavily than backlinks or keyword density.

Not directly, and any agency claiming otherwise is overselling. What you can influence is whether your content is retrievable, quotable, and unambiguous when a model searches the live web. Assistants increasingly ground answers in real-time retrieval, and content structured for extraction wins those citations measurably more often.

We run a fixed set of 60 to 100 buyer questions against ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews every month, and report citation share as the percentage of those answers that mention you by name. We pair that with referrer-based session data from assistant traffic.

GEO runs as a quarterly retainer covering the citation baseline, answer-architecture work, the statistics library, and monthly tracking. Clients already on an SEO retainer add it at a reduced rate, because the technical foundation is shared and does not need building twice. Quoted after the baseline audit.

GEO is the practice of making your content more likely to be cited when an AI assistant synthesises an answer. It differs from SEO because there is no results page to rank on: the assistant reads sources, composes a response, and attributes some of them. Being readable and quotable determines whether you are one.

The mechanisms are real and the measurement is genuinely harder than SEO. Assistants retrieve and cite sources, and content structured for extraction is cited more often than content that is not. What deserves scepticism is anyone quoting precise citation-share guarantees, since visibility varies by assistant, by query and week to week.

By running a defined set of real buying-intent queries against each major assistant on a schedule and recording whether you are cited, what is quoted, and which competitor sources appear alongside. That produces a trend rather than a single number, which is the honest shape of the measurement.

Direct answers placed immediately under the heading they answer, self-contained passages that make sense lifted out of context, specific claims with sources rather than general assertions, and structure that maps to the question a user actually asked. Long preambles before the answer are the most common reason a page is passed over.

If you want to be cited, yes — blocking them guarantees invisibility in that surface. The decision is a genuine trade-off between attribution and traffic, since an assistant answering from your content may satisfy the user without a click. It should be made deliberately per crawler rather than by default.

Rarely. Assistants retrieve from indexes and from live fetches, both of which depend on your pages being crawlable, fast and correctly rendered. GEO is largely a content and structure discipline layered on a technical foundation, and where that foundation is broken the content work has nothing to stand on.