What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

By Jo van Vuuren — Fractional CMO

Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is what search engine optimisation is for a search results page, except the destination is an AI-generated answer and there may be no page of results at all. It exists because a growing number of people now ask a question to ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews and get a written answer straight back, sometimes with sources, sometimes without ever visiting a website.

Why GEO exists

For years, the goal of digital visibility was a rank: appear on page one, ideally near the top, and the click follows. That model still works for a large share of searches. But it isn’t the whole picture any more. When someone asks an AI system a question directly, the system reads across many sources, synthesises an answer, and presents it as prose. Occasionally it names where it drew from. Often it doesn’t. Being “findable” now includes being the source an AI chooses to draw on and trust, whether or not that produces a visible link.

What actually seems to help

Nobody outside the AI labs knows the full mechanics of how these systems select and weight sources, and anyone claiming certainty here should be treated with caution. What does align with how these tools are known to work, and with good publishing practice generally, is:

• Clear, direct answers: stating the point plainly near the top of a page, in language close to how the question would actually be asked.
• Genuine structure: proper headings, short paragraphs, lists and FAQs that a system can parse and lift cleanly, rather than one dense wall of text.
• Entity clarity: being unambiguous about who you are, what you do and who you serve, consistently, across your site and any third-party listings.
• Authority and E-E-A-T signals: named expertise, a credible track record, and being referenced by other credible sites, all of which help a system judge whether a source is trustworthy.
• Genuine usefulness: content that would still be worth reading if no AI ever touched it, because that’s also the content most likely to be quoted, linked to and cited by other people, which in turn feeds the systems.

How this differs from gaming keywords

Older SEO tactics (stuffing a page with a keyword, chasing exact-match phrases, building links purely to build links) are a poor fit for GEO, and increasingly a poor fit for search generally. Generative systems are synthesising meaning across a passage, not scanning for a phrase. A page that reads naturally, answers the actual question, and says something specific tends to outperform a page engineered to rank but light on substance. GEO rewards being genuinely quotable over being technically keyword-optimised.

What to be honest about

GEO is a fast-moving area, and the mechanics of any one AI system can change without notice. There’s no reliable way yet to guarantee a citation, and measurement is still immature compared with the analytics available for search rankings. Anyone selling a fixed formula for “guaranteed AI visibility” is overstating what’s currently knowable. The more defensible position is to build the fundamentals that plausibly help (clarity, structure, authority, usefulness) and to keep watching how your business actually shows up.

Where to start

Begin by asking the questions your customers would ask an AI tool, and checking what it currently says about you, if anything. Tighten the gaps you find (unclear positioning, thin pages, missing structure) using the same practices above. GEO isn’t a separate discipline bolted onto your existing content; it’s a reason to make that content clearer and more genuinely useful than it already is.