Generative Engine Optimisation

GEO: Get found when your buyers ask AI

Generative Engine Optimisation, GEO, is the work of getting your brand found, cited, and recommended inside AI-generated answers: Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. The goal is no longer only to rank in a list of links and earn a click. It is to be the source the AI quotes, and the name it puts forward when someone asks for a recommendation.

Here is the honest version, because the field is full of hype. GEO is an extension of SEO, not a replacement and not a separate magic discipline. Roughly eighty per cent of what drives AI visibility is good fundamental SEO. The genuinely new part is the remaining twenty: brand authority, being mentioned by other people, and structuring content so an AI can quote it cleanly. Anyone selling secret technical hacks is overselling.

Why it matters now

Search behaviour is shifting, and the direction is not in doubt even where the exact numbers are argued over. Around two-thirds of US Google searches now end without a click. When an AI Overview appears, click-through to the top result roughly halves. Traffic from AI assistants is still small, on the order of one per cent of the total, but it is growing quickly and tends to convert better, because the people who arrive have already had their question half-answered.

The risk is quiet. Your rankings can hold while your clicks fall, because the answer now sits above the links. Being on the results page is no longer the same as being in the answer.

The brands that AI names as the default in a category tend to win the high-intent traffic that is left. That is the visibility GEO is trying to earn.

What GEO actually involves

Most of the work is unglamorous and familiar. A smaller part is genuinely new. We are honest about which is which, because the split is where the money should go.

The foundations (the eighty per cent)

Technical health, clear structure, genuine expertise, and topical depth. AI engines favour content that already ranks and reads well, so this is where most of the work sits.

Brand authority and earned media (the new twenty)

AI answers lean on what other people say about you, not just your own pages. Being quoted in trade press, comparison articles, and reputable directories now drives visibility more than backlinks do.

Content an AI can quote

A direct answer near the top, clear headings, real statistics, and cited sources. Structured, extractable, and kept current rather than left to age.

Presence where AI looks

Community and reference platforms (Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, LinkedIn) are cited well above their weight. Genuine participation, not spam.

How we work

GEO is a programme, not a one-off fix. We run it in four stages, and you can stop after any of them.

1

AI visibility audit

We take fifteen to thirty prompts your buyers would actually use and run them across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI answers. We record where you appear, where competitors appear, and what gets cited, and we check that AI crawlers can reach your site. You get a baseline you can measure against.

2

Protect and structure

We defend the high-intent, transactional searches that AI is least likely to eat, and restructure your priority pages so an AI can extract a clean answer: a short direct answer up top, clear headings, real sourced figures, and tidy schema.

3

Build authority

This is where the new effort goes. Digital PR and earned media, original research worth citing, and a genuine presence on the platforms AI draws from. The aim is to be mentioned, by other people, in the places AI reads.

4

Measure and iterate

We track share of voice, how often you are cited, the sentiment of each mention, and AI referral traffic and conversions, all against the same fixed set of prompts. We review quarterly and move budget to what is working.

What we will not do

The fastest way to waste money on GEO is to buy the hype. A few things we will not sell you.

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No secret technical hacks. Google has publicly debunked several of the tricks doing the rounds (special files for AI, content chopped into chunks, pages rewritten purely for machines). We treat clear structure and schema as good practice for readers, not citation insurance.
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No guaranteed number one in ChatGPT. There is no position one in an AI answer, and the same prompt can return different results each time. Anyone promising a fixed ranking is selling something.
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No separate magic discipline. You cannot do GEO without SEO, because the only levers are your own site and the work off it. We will not run a parallel programme that quietly repackages search work at a premium.
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An honest split, always. We will tell you which part of the work is ordinary SEO and which is the genuinely new layer, and roughly what each is worth.

Who it is for

GEO is the right move when discovery in your market is already shifting towards AI answers.

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You rank well but are losing clicks. Your positions hold, yet traffic is draining away to AI summaries that answer the question on the page.
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Your buyers are asking AI for recommendations. They put a question to ChatGPT or Perplexity in your category, and you have no idea whether you come up.
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A competitor has become the default answer. Your content is good, but someone else is the name the AI puts forward first.
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You want a straight assessment. A clear read on where you stand, not a magic-bullet retainer.
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You have no SEO foundation yet. GEO sits on top of SEO, so without the fundamentals there is nothing for it to build on. That is the place to start, and we will tell you so on the call.

Where it fits

GEO is about how people find you, which increasingly happens before they ever reach your site. It sits naturally alongside the website those answers point to, and the website design review that already covers your technical SEO and how the site reads to search engines. The clearest place to begin is the audit: a baseline of where you stand in AI answers today.

Start with an AI visibility audit

Tell us your category and the questions your buyers ask. We will show you where you stand in AI answers today and what it would take to improve it. The first conversation is free, takes about thirty minutes, and comes with no obligation. Read more about what working with us looks like, or get in touch directly.

Book a call →
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