What GEO actually means (and what it isn't)
There is a quiet panic going through marketing teams right now. Their organic traffic is flat or down. Their analytics tool is reporting fewer sessions from Google. And meanwhile their CEO has just used ChatGPT to plan a holiday, draft a brief, and find a supplier, and is now asking the very reasonable question: are we visible there too?
That question, in one form or another, is what most clients now bring to the first call. The answer is what the field calls GEO, and it deserves a clearer definition than the one currently circulating.
A working definition
GEO is short for Generative Engine Optimisation. The shortest honest definition I use with clients is this: GEO is the practice of making your brand cited inside AI answer engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overviews) when buyers ask for what you sell.
That is the whole thing. Not “ranking” in an AI engine, because the engines do not really rank in the way Google does. Not “appearing” in an engine, because almost anything can appear once with a long-tail prompt. Cited, by name, in answers to the queries your buyers actually run, often enough to be useful.
The discipline is new because the surface is new, but the underlying mechanics are not exotic. The engines need to find content, judge it as authoritative, and choose to attribute it. Each of those steps has practical levers. They overlap with SEO in some places and diverge in others, which is where the confusion sits.
What GEO is not
It is not just SEO with a new label. The honest practitioners I respect, the ones who have been doing this since the early ChatGPT browse mode in 2023, will tell you that some SEO assumptions transfer cleanly and others actively mislead.
What transfers: the importance of crawlability, of clean information architecture, of factual consistency across the web, of structured data, of authoritative inbound links. If your site is invisible to a competent crawler, no engine will surface you, traditional or generative.
What does not transfer well: the obsession with keyword density, with exact-match phrasing, and with the SERP-position framing of “we are number 3 for this term”. AI engines synthesise. They blend, paraphrase, and condense. A page that earns the citation in a Perplexity answer often does so because it is the cleanest available source of a specific fact, not because it ranks first for any particular query string.
GEO is also not prompt engineering. There is a small industry growing around guides that promise to teach you how to get cited by writing your content in some special way. Mostly that is noise. The engines reward useful, scannable, well-attributed content, the same kind that has always worked. The difference is that the bar for “well-attributed” has risen sharply.
What actually moves the needle
I will give you the three things I push first with every client, in the order I push them.
First, make yourself the obvious answer to one specific question. Pick one query a real buyer would run. “What is the best appointment-booking software for UK dental practices” is a real example from a client. Then look at what an answer engine would need to cite you confidently: a clearly-titled comparison page, a feature breakdown that can be quoted in two sentences, a fact about your customer base that is concrete. Build that page properly, with schema, with internal links, with a clear “this is who we are” paragraph. Then check the engines after six to eight weeks. Citations follow content that earns them.
Second, fix your About and Services pages. Every engine I have tested treats these two pages with disproportionate weight. They are how the engine works out who you are, what you sell, and whether to trust you. If your About page has 80 words and a stock photo, the engine has nothing to go on. If your Services page is a slide deck PDF, the engine cannot read you. Plain, readable, fact-dense pages on the public site are non-negotiable.
Third, get cited elsewhere. AI engines look at the broader web to corroborate. Industry publications, podcasts, expert quotes in news pieces, conference talks, even decent guest posts. Not link-building in the 2014 sense. Reputation-building in the 2026 sense. The two have always been the same thing dressed up differently.
A few honest caveats
GEO does not replace SEO. Most of my clients still get the majority of their qualified pipeline from organic Google search. The mix is shifting, but the legacy channel is not dead, and I would be wary of any consultant who tells you otherwise.
GEO measurement is genuinely difficult. There is no equivalent of Search Console for ChatGPT. The tools that promise to track AI citations are improving fast but are still partial. We run periodic manual prompts in the engines, in private browsing, and log what we see. That is the honest current state of the art.
And GEO results take longer than the AI hype cycle would suggest. From the moment a client implements the first wave of changes, I tell them to expect twelve weeks before they see meaningful citation lift. The engines are slow to rebuild their internal representations of your brand. That is fine. The compounding starts once they have.
Where to start
If you can only do one thing this quarter: pick the single highest-value query a buyer would run, and build the page that should be the obvious answer to it. Put your name in the page, put your customer count in the page, put the comparison data in the page, mark it up with schema. Then leave it alone for two months and see what happens.
That is GEO. The rest is detail.