What is GEO, really?

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of making a website easy for AI-powered search and answer engines to crawl, parse, understand, trust and cite. It is not a replacement for SEO. It is what SEO becomes when the result page is no longer a list of blue links but a synthesised answer with a handful of source citations.

Why a new acronym?

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Google's AI Overviews all read the web, but they read it differently from a classical search crawler. They prioritise structure, entity coherence, freshness, and verifiable claims. They reward content that is unambiguous, well-attributed and machine-extractable. They penalise pages where meaning is locked behind heavy JavaScript or buried under marketing language.

GEO is the discipline of optimising specifically for that behaviour.

What GEO is not

• It is not 'prompt engineering for your homepage'.
• It is not stuffing your content with synonyms hoping an LLM picks them up.
• It is not paying to be inside a model. No such product exists.
• It is not a guarantee. No tool, agency or course can promise you a citation in ChatGPT.

What GEO actually involves

1. Crawl access – letting the right AI bots in, deliberately.
2. Structured data – JSON-LD that makes your entities legible.
3. Semantic HTML – clear hierarchy, real headings, real lists.
4. Server-rendered content – meaningful text in the HTML, not assembled in the browser.
5. Trust signals – author, organisation, contact, transparency.
6. Citation-ready writing – definitions, comparisons, FAQs, summaries.

Where to start

Run a free audit, fix the critical issues first (HTTPS, robots.txt, missing schema, blocked AI bots), then move on to content patterns. Most sites can move from 'invisible to AI' to 'reasonably citable' inside a couple of focused weeks.