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, press mentions and structured data. Three properties make a business quotable:

Machine-readable facts. Schema markup that states plainly what you are, what you do, where you serve and what you charge. Prose can be misread; structured data can't.

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, honest counterpoints included. 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, GEO work looks like this: comprehensive schema markup (Organisation, Service, FAQ, Person); content restructured into direct-answer format; an llms.txt file that briefs AI systems on your business at a standard address; a robots.txt that actually admits AI crawlers (many sites block GPTBot and ClaudeBot by accident and wonder why AI never mentions them); and business-data consistency across the web. If that sounds adjacent to good technical SEO — it is. GEO is a layer on top of the fundamentals, not a replacement for them.

GEO vs SEO: not a rivalry

Everything AI systems draw on — crawlable pages, structured data, authority signals, reviews — is built by traditional SEO. Skip the SEO and there's nothing for the AI to find; skip the GEO and what it finds is hard to quote. The businesses winning AI recommendations are doing both, which is why AI search optimisation is part of every Webolific engagement rather than a separate product.

Can you measure GEO? An honest answer

Partially. You can test what assistants say about your market and whether you're named; you can track AI-referred traffic (assistants increasingly link their sources); and you can monitor AI Overview appearances for your queries. What you can't yet do is track "AI rankings" the way rank trackers follow Google positions — the technology is younger than the sales pitches around it. Anyone promising precise AI rank tracking is ahead of what's measurable. What's undeniable is the direction: early, consistent machine-readability compounds, because AI systems build their picture of your business 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.