What Is GEO? Getting ChatGPT and Google AI to Recommend Your Brand

The search behind the search

A growing share of your customers no longer sees a results page at all. They ask ChatGPT which vendor to shortlist, or Google hands them an AI Overview above the first link. The assistant reads the web, forms an answer, and cites a handful of sources. GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation, is the discipline of being in that handful. The prize changed shape: instead of ranking as one blue link among ten, you're either inside the answer or invisible, and the businesses that adapt early inherit the recommendation traffic of everyone who didn't.

How AI engines pick their sources

Generative engines cite pages they can extract from confidently. In practice that rewards four properties. Directness: a page that answers the question in its opening sentence gives the engine a quotable unit. Structure: headings that map to questions, tables that compare options, FAQ blocks with schema markup, all of it machine-legible. Verifiability: concrete figures, named methods and consistent facts that cross-check against your LinkedIn, your Google Business Profile and third-party listings. And genuine expertise: engines increasingly weight content that reads like it was written by someone who does the work, because their training taught them what generic filler looks like.

The GEO checklist

The working checklist we apply: open every page with one sentence that answers "what is this and who is it for". Keep a comparison table wherever a choice is being made; engines love citing tables. Mark up FAQs, services, articles and breadcrumbs with schema. Publish a plain-text summary of key pages (a .md mirror and an llms.txt index) so crawlers for AI systems get clean input. Keep names, numbers and claims identical everywhere they appear on the web. And answer the questions buyers actually ask, in their words, because assistant queries are conversational, not keyword-clipped.

What stays the same from SEO

GEO is not a replacement religion. AI engines lean on the same signals search always rewarded: crawlable sites, fast pages, structured data, authoritative content, real backlinks. A site that ranks well organically is most of the way to citation-worthy; GEO is the last layer that makes the content extractable. Which means the order of operations holds: fix technical SEO first, build genuinely expert content second, then shape it for machines that quote. Skipping to step three produces beautifully structured pages nothing ever cites.

How we apply GEO on this site

We practise this on the site you're reading. Every service page opens with a one-line definition, carries an FAQ with schema, and ships a markdown mirror; the About page keeps a service comparison table; an llms.txt at the root indexes it all for AI crawlers. When an assistant is asked "who does one-stop digital work for SMEs", these are the pages built to be its source. The same wiring goes into client sites as standard on every web and content engagement.

Measuring something this new

GEO measurement is young but workable: log AI-referral sessions in analytics (assistants increasingly pass referrer data), run a monthly panel of the questions you want to win across ChatGPT and Google AI, and record whether you're cited and for which pages. Expect movement in months, not days, the same patience organic search always demanded. The compounding is the point: every question you win becomes a recommendation delivered with an assistant's authority, repeated every time anyone asks.