What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

Generative engine optimisation (GEO), often called AI SEO, is the practice of making your business visible and recommendable in AI-generated answers: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews. Where traditional SEO competes for a position in a list of links, GEO competes for a mention in the answer itself — and increasingly, the answer is all your customer reads.

Why GEO suddenly matters

A growing share of buying journeys now starts with a question to an assistant rather than a search box: "who's a good accountant near me?", "recommend a reliable builder in Newport". Google's own results now open with AI Overviews for a large share of queries, meaning even people who do use Google may get an AI-composed answer above the traditional links. If AI systems can't read, verify and trust your business, you're invisible in the fastest-growing part of search, no matter how well you rank in the old part.

How AI answers actually choose businesses

AI assistants don't have a secret opinion of your company. They compose answers from what they can crawl, retrieve and cross-check: your website, your Google Business Profile, directories, reviews and press mentions. Google's AI features go one step further and retrieve from its ordinary search index, so a page that can't rank or be snippeted can't be cited either. Three properties make a business quotable:

Findability in ordinary search. AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on the same index as the blue links, so being crawlable, indexed and eligible for a snippet is the entry ticket. Schema markup helps a machine resolve what your business is, and earns rich results in its own right, but Google states plainly that structured data is not required to appear in its AI features. Worth doing. Not the lever it gets sold as.

Citation-ready content. AI systems lift answers from pages that answer directly: a complete, factual statement in the first paragraph, headings phrased as real questions, and counterpoints stated plainly. Balanced sources get cited; sales copy gets skipped.

Consistency everywhere. Assistants cross-reference. If your services, address or phone number differ between your site, your Google profile and directories, the safest move for the AI is to leave you out.

What a GEO engagement actually involves

Practically, the work looks like this: pages Google can crawl, index and snippet; content restructured into direct-answer format so a passage stands on its own; sound technical basics and consistent business data across the web; a robots.txt that actually admits AI crawlers (many sites block GPTBot and ClaudeBot by accident and wonder why AI never mentions them); schema markup for entity clarity and rich results; and optionally an llms.txt file, though Google has confirmed its own Search ignores it. If that sounds like good technical SEO, that is because it is. Google describes optimising for its AI features as the same discipline under a newer name, not a separate service to buy.

GEO vs SEO: not a rivalry

Everything AI systems draw on (crawlable pages, genuinely helpful content, authority signals, reviews, consistent business data) is built by traditional SEO. There is no second discipline sitting on top of it. The only thing GEO usefully adds is emphasis: write so the answer is easy to lift, and make the business easy to verify. Skip the SEO and there is nothing for the AI to find. That is why AI search optimisation is part of every Webolific engagement rather than a separate product sold alongside it.

Can you measure GEO? What's actually trackable

Partially. Search Console's Generative AI report covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, so Google's side is measurable. Beyond that you can test what assistants say about your market and whether you're named, and you can track AI-referred traffic as assistants increasingly link their sources. What you can't yet do is track "AI rankings" the way rank trackers follow Google positions, and no equivalent of the Search Console report exists for ChatGPT or Perplexity. The technology is younger than the sales pitches around it, so anyone promising precise AI visibility reporting is overstating what's possible. The direction is clear enough: early, consistent business data compounds, because AI systems build their picture of you over time.

How to start (this week, for free)

Ask ChatGPT or Claude to recommend businesses in your category and town, and see if you're mentioned: that's your baseline. Check yourdomain.co.uk/robots.txt isn't blocking AI crawlers. Then look at your homepage the way a machine would: could a system extract what you do, where, and for whom in one pass? If not, that's the work — and it's exactly what a Webolific audit maps out, alongside the traditional SEO picture.

For the wider question of whether search is shrinking, see is SEO dead? For the other assistants, see how to get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity. If you are being pitched an add-on package, read whether AI SEO is a separate service.