What is Generative Engine Optimisation? A Plain-English Guide for Business Owners

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of structuring your website and content so that AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews find your business, understand it, and recommend it in their answers. Where traditional SEO earns you a position in a list of blue links, GEO earns you a mention in the answer itself.

It matters because your customers have changed how they ask. “Best paediatric dentist near me” typed into Google is being joined by “which paediatric dentist should I take my anxious five-year-old to?” asked to an AI assistant, and the assistant replies with two or three names, not ten links. If your business isn’t one of the names, you were never in the running.

Where did the term come from?

GEO was formalised in a 2024 research paper by academics from Princeton, Georgia Tech, the Allen Institute for AI and IIT Delhi, presented at the KDD conference. The researchers tested nine optimisation methods across thousands of queries and found that specific content changes could improve a website’s visibility in AI-generated answers by up to 40 per cent. You may also hear the same idea called Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), AI SEO or LLM optimisation. The label matters less than the practice.

How is GEO different from SEO?

They overlap heavily, and good SEO remains the foundation, but the goal shifts.

• SEO optimises for a ranking algorithm that returns a list. Success is being clicked.
• GEO optimises for a language model that composes an answer. Success is being cited, quoted or recommended inside that answer.

An AI engine doesn’t rank ten options for the user to compare; it synthesises a response from sources it can read and trust. That changes what wins. Pages that answer questions directly, state facts plainly, cite sources and can be read without executing JavaScript get pulled into answers. Pages built on clever slogans and image-heavy layouts get skipped, however beautiful they are.

What actually improves AI visibility?

The Princeton research found the most effective methods were adding citations to credible sources, quotations from relevant authorities and statistics, each lifting visibility significantly, while old SEO habits like keyword stuffing did almost nothing. In practice, GEO for a business website means:

• Question-based headings with direct answers. “How much does a rebrand cost in Australia?” as a heading, answered in the first two sentences beneath it.
• A clear, plain-text statement of who you are. Your business name, location, services and specialisation written as ordinary sentences an AI can lift verbatim. If that sentence doesn’t exist on your site, an AI can’t say it.
• Specifics over slogans. Dates, prices, regulation names, process steps and numbers are quotable. “Solutions that inspire” is not.
• FAQ sections with schema markup. Structured data (FAQPage, LocalBusiness, Organization) confirms to machines what your pages say to humans.
• Content AI crawlers can actually read. Most AI crawlers don’t execute JavaScript, so anything loaded by scripts, from animated counters to background-image galleries, is invisible to them.
• Genuine authority content. Detailed, sourced guides on the questions your customers ask, because AI engines favour pages that resolve a query completely.

Does GEO replace SEO?

No. Google still drives the majority of discovery, and AI engines lean on many of the same signals of authority and clarity that Google rewards. Think of GEO as an extension: the technical hygiene, structured data and authoritative content that win AI citations also tend to strengthen classic rankings. The businesses losing ground are the ones treating AI search as a fad rather than a second front.

How do you know if it’s working?

AI visibility is measurable, just differently: ask the major assistants the questions your customers ask (“best [your service] in [your area]”, “who should I use for [problem]”) and record whether you’re named, monitor referral traffic from AI platforms in your analytics, and re-test after publishing structured content. Movement typically shows within weeks of AI crawlers re-reading your site, though authority builds over months.

Frequently asked questions