What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

A growing number of people no longer start with a search box. They ask an assistant: "who's the best physio near me?", "recommend a good conveyancing solicitor", "what's a reliable accountant for a small limited company?" The assistant doesn't hand back ten links to sift through — it writes an answer and names a few businesses. Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is the term for the work of improving the chance that yours is one of them.

What GEO actually means

Strip away the jargon and GEO is simple to state: making your business easy for AI assistants to find, understand and trust, so they name you when someone asks for a business like yours. The "generative engines" are the tools that generate written answers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini. GEO is the practice of being the business those tools reach for.

It is not a trick, a plug-in, or a setting you switch on. It is mostly about being clearly and consistently present in the places these tools look when they decide who to recommend.

Why it suddenly matters

The reason GEO has appeared out of nowhere is that the behaviour it serves has appeared out of nowhere. Until recently, if a customer wanted a recommendation they searched, scrolled and chose. Now a large share of that first step happens inside an assistant, and the assistant does the choosing of who to mention. If your business isn't named, you don't get a lower ranking — you simply never come up, and you never find out you were in the running. The enquiry goes to whoever was named.

How AI assistants actually pick businesses

This is the part worth understanding, because it explains everything GEO does. These tools answer in two ways. A small part comes from what the model absorbed during training, which you can't edit and which updates slowly. The larger and growing part comes from live retrieval — the assistant searches the web as it answers and summarises what it finds. That means being recommended is mostly about being present, and trusted, in the sources those tools pull from.

And here is the crucial detail: for "who should I hire" style questions, the assistants lean heavily on third-party sources, not your own website. Reviews, business directories, professional registers, local press, and community threads carry more weight than your homepage, because the assistant treats them as independent corroboration. Your own site still matters — it has to be clear, consistent and readable by these tools — but it is rarely enough on its own.

What GEO work actually involves

Done honestly, GEO is a short list of unglamorous, legitimate work:

• Make sure the tools can read you. Your site should be crawlable and not accidentally blocking the AI search bots — a surprisingly common own-goal.
• Keep one consistent set of facts everywhere. Name, location, services, hours and the like, matching across your site, your Google Business Profile and the directories. Inconsistency makes an assistant hesitate.
• Be present in the sources they trust. Genuine reviews, relevant directories and registers, local press, the odd well-placed mention. This is the biggest lever, and the slowest.
• Make your pages quotable. State plainly what you do, where, for whom, and roughly what it costs, and answer the real questions customers ask.

What GEO can't do — and who to be wary of

No one can guarantee you'll be named in ChatGPT. The answers are probabilistic: they shift by the person asking, the exact phrasing, the model and the day. Anyone selling a guaranteed AI ranking, or a quick way to "submit your site to ChatGPT", is selling something that doesn't exist. Honest GEO improves your chances and fixes what's genuinely holding you back; it never promises a result.

The useful first question isn't "how do I rank in ChatGPT" — it's "what does ChatGPT currently say when someone asks for a business like mine, and who does it name instead?"

Where to start

Before changing anything, find out where you actually stand. Ask the assistants the questions your customers would ask and see whether you're named, who is named instead, and which sources the tools are citing to make the choice. That picture tells you whether you have a real gap and, if so, exactly where it is. For the next layer of detail, see how GEO, AEO and SEO differ, and how to check whether ChatGPT recommends your business.

Common questions

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