I started in search in 2008, when SEO meant meta tags, directory submissions and a lot of link building. Every few years since, someone has declared SEO dead. It never was — it just changed shape. What’s happening now is the biggest change yet, and it has a new name: Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO.
What GEO actually means
GEO is the practice of making sure your brand, products and information appear — accurately — in answers generated by AI systems: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google’s AI Overviews.
The difference from classic SEO is simple to describe and hard to live with. A search results page gives the customer ten options and lets them choose. An AI answer usually makes the choice for them. It names two or three providers, summarises what they do, and moves on. If you’re not in that short list, you don’t get the click, because there often isn’t one.
How AI assistants decide what to say
Without going into model internals, two things matter for a business:
- What the model already “knows” from the content it was trained on — which favours brands that are consistently described across many trustworthy sources.
- What it retrieves live when it searches the web to answer a question — which favours pages that are crawlable, clearly structured and directly answer the question being asked.
Both reward the same underlying quality: being a clear, consistent, well-cited entity with genuinely useful information.
GEO doesn’t replace SEO. It raises the bar on the things good SEO always should have done.
A practical GEO checklist
1. Fix the foundations
If search engines can’t crawl and understand your site, AI retrieval can’t either. Technical SEO — fast pages, clean HTML, sensible internal linking, no content hidden behind scripts — is still step one.
2. Be a consistent entity
Describe your business the same way everywhere: website, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, directories, press. Use structured data (Organisation, Person, Product, FAQ) so machines can read who you are, what you do and where you operate.
3. Answer real questions directly
AI assistants lift clear, self-contained answers. Pages that open with a direct answer, then support it with detail, are far easier to cite than pages that bury the point under marketing copy.
4. Earn mentions, not just links
Being discussed in credible industry publications, reviews and communities shapes how models describe you. Digital PR matters again — for different reasons.
5. Measure what AI says about you
Regularly ask the major assistants the questions your customers ask. Record whether you appear, who appears instead, and whether the facts are right. It’s the new rank tracking.
Where to start
For most businesses, the first step isn’t a new tool. It’s a baseline: how visible are you in traditional search today, and what do AI assistants currently say about you and your competitors? From there, the gaps are usually obvious — and most of the fixes are good marketing anyway.