What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?

Sixty percent of Google searches now end without a single click to anyone’s website. People get their answer on the results page, or straight from an AI, and never visit a site at all. That one number is the whole reason GEO exists.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the practice of structuring your website so AI answer engines, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google’s AI Overviews, cite and recommend your business when someone asks them a question. SEO was about ranking you in a list. GEO is about making you the answer.

Why this is suddenly a thing

For twenty years the job was simple: get to the top of Google’s results. That worked because people scrolled a list of links and clicked one. They mostly don’t anymore.

Three things changed at once:

• People now ask AI a question in plain English and read the one answer it writes back.
• Google bolted its own AI Overview on top of the results, pushing the real links down the page.
• Most searches get answered before anyone clicks anything.

So “page one of Google” is worth less than it was. What’s worth more is being the business the AI trusts enough to name. That’s a different game, and almost nobody in your local market is playing it yet.

How it differs from SEO

They’re cousins, not opposites. Good basics help both. But the emphasis moves.

	SEO	GEO
Goal	Rank in a list of links	Get named inside one written answer
Wins on	Keywords, backlinks, authority	Clear facts, structure, being quotable
You measure	Your ranking position	Whether the AI says your name

SEO still matters, to be clear. Billions of people still click links every day. GEO is the second front door, not a replacement for the first.

What actually moves the needle

Here’s the good part: you don’t need backlinks or a budget to start. GEO rewards clarity, and a focused small business can be clearer than a sprawling competitor.

The biggest single win, the one I’d do before anything else, is to answer the customer’s question in the very first sentence of the page, in plain words, with a real fact in it. AI engines lift sentences that stand on their own. A vague intro gives them nothing to quote.

After that:

1. Let the AI crawlers in. Your robots.txt should explicitly allow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. Block them and you can’t be cited, full stop.
2. State hard facts. “Live in 3 to 5 working days” gets quoted. “Fast turnaround” gets ignored.
3. Add structured data (FAQPage, Article, Organization schema) so engines know what your page means.
4. Publish a llms.txt file pointing AI at your best pages.
5. Show a visible “updated” date. Engines favour content that looks current.

The honest bit

GEO is early. The tactics will shift as the AI tools change, and anyone promising guaranteed citations is guessing. But the underlying bet is safe: more people will ask AI, fewer will scroll links, and the businesses that are clear, factual and easy to quote will get named. The ones hiding behind marketing fluff won’t.

If you’d rather not wire up robots.txt, schema and llms.txt yourself, that’s exactly the sort of thing we handle as part of a managed online presence. Either way, the move is the same: make your business the easiest one for an AI to recommend.