GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)
What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
Making your content easy for the major AI chatbots and AI-powered search tools to find, trust and cite. It's the AI-era relative of SEO: instead of ranking blue links, you aim to be the source the model quotes. Also called AEO (answer engine optimization). In practice the two terms mean the same thing.
Why it matters
Search is splitting into two behaviours, and the second one barely existed a short while ago. People still type queries and click links, but a growing share now asks an assistant a question and reads one synthesized answer, never seeing a results page. If your company is not among the sources that answer draws on, you are invisible in that moment, however well you rank in traditional search. That is the shift GEO responds to. It also changes what winning looks like: not a click to your site, but a mention or citation inside an answer someone else’s tool generated, which you cannot buy outright and cannot fully control.
In practice
A firm publishes a clear, well-structured explainer on a topic it wants to be known for, written so an assistant can lift a plain definition and attribute it. Later, when buyers ask an AI tool about that topic, the tool summarises the firm’s page and names it as the source. The direct traffic matters less than being the reference the machine trusts enough to quote.
