GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — means improving the chance that AI answer systems use and cite your content. AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity increasingly answer questions directly, and being the source they draw on is the new visibility.
How this differs from SEO
Less than the marketing suggests. Generative systems draw heavily on the same web content search engines index, and the qualities that help are largely the qualities that always helped: clear structure, accurate facts, real expertise, technical accessibility.
What changes is emphasis. Classic SEO competes for a position in a list. GEO competes to be the passage a system quotes, which rewards content that can be extracted cleanly and stands up out of context.
What appears to help
Answer the question early
Systems extract passages. A page that states the answer plainly in the first paragraph, then explains, gets used. A page that circles for four paragraphs before defining anything does not.
Structure that maps to questions
Headings phrased as the questions people actually ask, with the answer directly beneath. Self-contained sections that make sense pulled out.
Consistent facts everywhere
If your founding year, team size or service area differs between your website, your profiles and directory listings, systems will surface whichever version they met. Inconsistency is how confidently wrong statements about you get generated.
Evidence and attribution
Named authors, dates, cited sources and specific data. Unattributed generic claims are the least citable content there is.
Technical accessibility
If a page requires JavaScript execution to show its content, some systems will not see it.
What does not work
Keyword stuffing aimed at AI, "prompt injection" text hidden on pages, and mass-generated content produced by the same models doing the answering. The last one is self-defeating: you are competing with output the system can already produce.
The honest limitations
Nobody can guarantee appearance in AI answers. Systems change without notice, answers vary between runs for the same prompt, and there is no equivalent of a ranking report.
Anyone selling guaranteed AI placement is selling something that does not exist.
Measuring it
Define a fixed set of prompts relevant to your business, record how systems answer them, and repeat on a schedule. Individual answers fluctuate; trends over months are the signal.
Track brand mentions in answers, not just links, since many systems reference without linking.
Will AI answers reduce our traffic?
For purely informational queries, plausibly yes. Commercial queries still send people to sites, because people buying something want to see the seller.
Should we block AI crawlers?
That is a business decision, not a technical one. Blocking protects content from being used without attribution; it also removes you from answers where you might have been the cited source.
Is GEO worth investing in separately?
Mostly it is SEO done well, plus fact consistency and answer-shaped structure. Treat it as an additional requirement, not a separate budget line.