What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

What does generative engine optimisation mean in plain terms?

GEO means making sure AI tools say the right things about your business when people ask them for help. The term is usually searched with US spelling, as generative engine optimization. A generative engine is any tool that writes an answer rather than handing you a list of links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, Claude and Google's AI Overviews all fit that description.

The name comes from a 2023 research paper, GEO, Generative Engine Optimization, later accepted at the KDD 2024 conference. The authors described generative engines as systems that combine search with generative models. They then tested which content changes made a source more visible inside the answers.

For a business, the goal is simple. A buyer asks "who is the best kitchen fitter in Leeds" or "which payroll software suits a small charity". You want to be named, named early, described correctly and linked.

Why does GEO matter for a business now?

It matters because more buying questions now get answered before anyone clicks. Google shows AI Overviews above its results, and ChatGPT and Perplexity answer questions directly. If the answer names three firms and you are not one of them, you may never know the buyer existed.

The effect on clicks is real. A Pew Research Center study tracked the browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025. When a Google AI summary appeared, people clicked a normal result in 8% of visits. Without one, they clicked in 15% of visits.

That does not mean search traffic is finished. It does mean being mentioned inside the answer has become a goal in its own right.

How do AI engines decide what to say?

AI engines draw on two things. One is what the model learned in training. The other is what it finds on the web at the moment it answers. Most GEO work comes down to influencing both.

What the model already knows. Large language models are trained on huge amounts of public text. If your brand was written about widely and consistently before the training cut-off, the model will have a picture of you. If it was not, it may know nothing, or it may guess.

What it looks up live. Search-enabled engines search before they answer. OpenAI says ChatGPT search rewrites your question into one or more targeted queries and sends them to search providers. Google describes a query fan-out technique for AI Overviews and AI Mode, where it runs several related searches across subtopics. The engine then reads what it found and writes an answer based on those pages.

The two routes need different work. Live retrieval rewards pages that rank, load cleanly and state facts plainly. Model memory rewards a long record of consistent mentions across the web. There is more on this in how AI engines choose sources.

Which AI engines does GEO cover?

GEO covers any engine where your buyers ask questions. For most UK businesses that means the six below. They behave differently, so it helps to know where each one gets its information.

The same question can get a different answer from each engine. It can also get a different answer from the same engine an hour later. That is normal, and it shapes how GEO should be measured.

Is GEO the same as SEO?

No, but GEO sits on top of SEO rather than replacing it. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page only needs to be indexed and eligible to show a normal snippet. So a site that Google cannot crawl or does not trust will struggle in its AI features too.

What GEO adds is a different unit of measure and a wider set of places to work. SEO tracks rankings and clicks for keywords. GEO tracks whether you are mentioned, where in the answer, in what tone, and which pages the engine relied on. Those pages are often not yours. They are directories, review sites, comparison articles and forum threads. The full comparison is in GEO vs SEO.

Does generative engine optimisation actually work, or is it hype?

It works, in the sense that content changes can move visibility in AI answers. It does not work in the sense of a guaranteed result. The GEO paper tested nine content changes. Adding quotations, adding statistics and citing sources did best, with visibility gains of up to 40% in the authors' tests. Keyword stuffing, an old SEO habit, did not help.

Those were controlled tests, and the authors found results varied by subject. Real engines change their models and their retrieval often. So treat any promise of guaranteed placement in ChatGPT with suspicion. What you can do is make a mention more likely, measure honestly and fix what is clearly wrong.

Some of what gets sold as GEO is hype. A new file format or a clever prompt trick will not make an unknown brand appear. Steady work on content, reputation and technical basics is what moves the numbers.

Why does a brand appear in one AI answer but not in a similar one?

Small changes in wording change what the engine searches for. "Best kitchen fitters in Leeds" and "affordable kitchen fitters near Leeds" can pull different pages, and so different brands. Each engine also picks from its results in a slightly different way each time.

Personal context plays a part in consumer apps too. Location, past chats and the model version can all shift the answer a little. This is why one screenshot proves very little. A set of related questions, run many times, shows the real pattern.

What does GEO work involve?

GEO work falls into five areas. Most businesses already do parts of it under the heading of SEO or PR.

1. Find the questions buyers ask

Start with questions, not keywords. A buyer might type "roofers near me" into Google. The same person might ask ChatGPT which roofing firms in Dundee have good reviews and do insurance work. Collect these from sales calls, enquiry forms, People Also Ask boxes and Reddit threads. This list becomes your prompt set.

2. Measure what the engines say now

Run those questions through each engine and record the results. Note whether you are named, your position in the answer, the tone, which competitors appear and which pages are cited. Repeat it on a schedule, because single answers vary.

3. Make your own pages easy to quote

AI engines pull short passages. Pages that answer a question in the first sentence under a clear heading are easier to lift. Specific facts help, such as prices, service areas, opening hours, dates, named authors and sources. Plain tables for comparisons help too.

4. Get mentioned where the engines look

For many buying questions, engines cite third-party pages more than brand websites. Look at which directories, review sites, trade bodies, local news sites and comparison articles get cited in your sector. Being listed accurately on those pages, with good reviews, is often the quickest route into answers.

5. Keep the facts straight

AI answers can be wrong about your prices, locations or services. That usually traces back to an old page, a stale directory listing or someone else's comparison article. Finding and correcting those sources is part of GEO. The steps are in when AI gets your business wrong.

What makes a page easy for an AI engine to quote?

A page is easy to quote when a short passage from it can stand on its own and still be correct. Engines lift a sentence or two, not the whole page. So each section needs to make sense without the paragraphs around it.

In practice, a few habits make the biggest difference.

• Put the answer first. Start each section with a sentence that answers its heading in full.
• Name things. Say "our Harrogate showroom is open until 6pm on Saturdays", not "we're open late at weekends".
• Show where facts come from. Link to the source of a figure, and date anything that changes.
• Say who wrote it. A named author with real experience helps both readers and engines judge trust.
• Keep one topic per page. A page that tries to answer twenty loosely related questions is harder to match to any one of them.

None of this is new. It is the same clear writing that has always helped readers. The difference is that an engine now rewards it more directly, because it can lift your sentence straight into an answer.

What technical basics does GEO need?

The technical side is short, but it still trips up a lot of sites.

• Let the right bots in. OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, apart from navigation links. Check robots.txt and your CDN or firewall settings too.
• Keep key facts in plain HTML text. Details locked inside images, PDFs or scripts are harder for bots to read.
• Add structured data that says who you are. Organization or LocalBusiness markup, with sameAs links to your official profiles, helps engines connect the dots. A free entity audit shows what your site currently says.
• Keep your Google Business Profile current. Google lists this among its good practices for AI features.

How do you measure GEO results?

You measure GEO by running a fixed set of questions on a schedule and tracking a few numbers over time. The main ones are mention rate, share of voice weighted by position, citations of your pages, sentiment and accuracy. How to measure AI visibility covers each one.

Treat the numbers as a sample. AI answers change from run to run, so one check tells you little. A trend over several weeks, across many questions, tells you a lot more. Google Search Console now has a generative AI report showing impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, which is a useful cross-check.

What is a GEO tool, and do you need one?

A GEO tool runs your questions through AI engines on a schedule and records what comes back. The better ones also show which sources were cited, how competitors compare and whether the answers are accurate.

You can do a lot by hand at first. Asking ten questions in ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google each month, and noting the results in a spreadsheet, will teach you a great deal. It stops working once you have more than a few dozen questions, several locations or clients to report to.

When comparing tools, a few plain questions help. Does it collect answers through the engines' own APIs? Does it show the cited pages? Does it weight position, or only count mentions? Does it tell you what to fix? A tool that only reports one score each month is close to a rank tracker with a new label.

Where should a business start with GEO?

A good place to start is small and specific.

1. Write down 20 to 30 questions your buyers really ask, in their own words.
2. Run them through ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google, and note who gets named.
3. List the sites the engines cite most for those questions.
4. Fix the obvious gaps, such as missing directory listings, blocked bots or pages that bury the answer.
5. Re-run the same questions each month and watch the trend, not single answers.

That is enough to show whether GEO matters in your market, and where the effort should go first.

How Axiom GEO helps

Axiom GEO runs your prompt set on a schedule across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Google AI Overviews. AI visibility tracking records whether you are mentioned, your position, sentiment and the competitors named, and turns this into share of voice weighted by position. AI citation tracking shows the domains and pages the engines cite, sorted by type. On the Professional plan and above, answer accuracy checks each claim against an approved fact sheet of your business and points to the page behind a wrong detail. Answers are collected through the engines' APIs, so treat the results as a regular sample rather than a copy of every consumer app.