What is GEO? Generative engine optimisation in plain English

GEO in one minute

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini "who is a reliable electrician near me?" and you will not get a page of ten links. You will get a short written answer that names a few businesses. GEO is the work of making sure yours is one of the names, and that what the assistant says about you is right.

"Generative" refers to the way these tools write a fresh answer from what they have read, instead of listing web pages. If an assistant has never heard of you, or cannot describe you with confidence, you are not on the shortlist, however good your work is.

How GEO differs from SEO

They overlap far more than the jargon suggests, so getting the basics right helps both. There is a third name, AEO, or answer engine optimisation, for being the one answer when Google's AI Overviews, Siri or Alexa give a single answer. People use all three loosely, and our SEO, AEO and GEO explainer sets them side by side.

What AI assistants look at

When asked for a recommendation, an assistant searches the web and reads what it finds: business websites, directory and review sites, map listings such as your Google Business Profile, and sometimes local news. It then names the businesses it can describe with confidence. In practice, assistants tend to name businesses that are:

• Clearly described on their own website: what they do, where, for whom.
• Described the same way in several places: the same name, address, phone number and services on the website, the business profile and directories.
• Well reviewed, with recent, genuine reviews.
• Easy to check: insurance, memberships, years trading and opening hours stated plainly.

What you can do about it

1. Make sure the robots can read you. Some security plugins, hosts and settings turn AI robots away without you knowing. Search robots should be let in, because blocking them hides you from answers. Whether to allow training robots is your choice.
2. Give each main service its own clear page, saying what, where and for whom near the top.
3. Answer real customer questions in plain words, with the answer in the first sentence.
4. Add structured business details that match what the page shows. See copy and paste.
5. Complete your Google Business Profile, plus Bing Places and Apple's business listing, with identical details everywhere.
6. Be listed on the directories and review sites assistants lean on for your trade, and ask for recent, genuine reviews.

How to see how you are doing

You can ask the assistants yourself. Type the questions a customer would ask, such as "who are the best roofing firms in your town?", into ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity, and see who gets named. Try it more than once, because answers change from one ask to the next. That is why it is worth looking at the pattern, not a single answer.

Our website check does this for you. The full report asks the three assistants four questions about your trade and your town, shows you whether each one named you, who they named instead and which websites they relied on, and checks whether anything on your site is turning their robots away. The example report shows how that looks, and being recommended by AI assistants explains how to read it.