A growing share of buying decisions now starts with a question to an AI, not a search box. Someone asks ChatGPT "who builds custom booking systems in Sydney?" and gets back a short list of names. If your business is on that list, you win work you never had to advertise for. If it is not, you are invisible at the exact moment someone is ready to hire.

Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, is the work that gets your business named and cited inside those AI answers. It is the natural next step after SEO, and it is early enough that most of your competitors are not doing it yet.

GEO, AEO and SEO: the plain-English version

  • SEO gets you ranked in Google’s list of blue links.
  • AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) gets you into the direct answer: Google’s AI Overviews, featured snippets, voice assistants.
  • GEO gets you cited by generative tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity when they compose an answer from scratch.

They share foundations, which is why they are best done together. The mechanics differ from chasing keywords: AI engines favour content that is clearly structured, genuinely authoritative, easy to quote, and consistent everywhere they find you.

What actually moves the result

Be easy to quote

Write clear questions with direct answers underneath. When a model can lift a clean sentence that answers exactly what the user asked, you are far more likely to be the source it cites.

Be consistent across the web

Models learn your facts from many places. If your services, location and name are described the same way on your site, your listings and your profiles, the AI trusts the answer. Contradictions make it hedge or skip you.

Give machines a clean read

Structured data (schema markup) tells an AI engine exactly who you are, what you do and who you serve. A small file called llms.txt gives AI crawlers a plain summary of your business. Both make you cheaper to understand, which makes you easier to cite.

Why now, not later

Gartner expects a large shift away from traditional search between now and 2028 as AI answers take over more queries. Being cited now, while few competitors are trying, is far easier than displacing them once the models already recommend them. GEO compounds the same way SEO does: the position you earn early keeps paying off.

This is the work we do under GEO and SEO together, so you are found by Google and recommended by AI. If you want to know where you stand today, that is a good first conversation.