Glossary /AI search & GEO
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)
Making a company findable and citable inside AI-generated answers, rather than only inside ranked lists of links.
Generative engine optimisation is the work of getting cited when an assistant answers a question, instead of getting ranked when a search engine lists pages. The buyer’s first move is increasingly a question to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, and the answer they receive names a handful of companies without them ever seeing a results page.
Most of the underlying work is familiar. Content has to be fetchable without executing JavaScript, structured clearly enough to be quoted in fragments, marked up so the entities are explicit, and corroborated by sources beyond the company’s own site. What changes is the target: being the passage the model retrieves, not the link the reader clicks.
The part that is genuinely new is that there is no ranking to check. Visibility has to be measured by asking the assistants the questions your buyers ask and recording who gets named, which is closer to brand tracking than to rank tracking.