GEO and AI Search Optimization
When someone asks ChatGPT or Gemini for a recommendation in your category, something gets named. This is the work of making sure it can be you.
Why this is a different problem
A search engine returns ten links and lets the person choose. An answer engine writes one answer and cites a handful of sources. Ranking fourth on a results page still gets you seen. Being the fifth-best source for an answer gets you nothing, because the answer only quotes two or three.
So the goal changes. Instead of competing for a position, you are trying to be the source a model reaches for, and the brand it can describe confidently. You will see this called GEO, generative engine optimization, or AEO, answer engine optimization. They describe the same work.
Five reasons a good site stays invisible to answer engines
The entity is unclear
A model has to know what your company is, what it sells, who it serves, and where it sits in the category before it can name you. Most sites never state that plainly anywhere.
The answer is buried
Your page may contain the answer in the ninth paragraph, after the brand story. A model extracting a claim rewards pages that answer the question in the first two sentences and then support it.
Nothing is machine readable
Organization, Person, Product, Service and FAQ structured data tell a parser what it is looking at instead of asking it to infer everything from prose.
Nothing corroborates you
Models are more willing to state something that several independent sources agree on. If your claims exist only on your own site, they stay unconfirmed and get left out.
The crawlers are blocked
Plenty of sites disallow GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and others in robots.txt without realising it, often because a plugin or a host added the rule. You cannot be cited by a system that cannot read you.
What the work covers
- Entity definition. Stating clearly and consistently what your business is, in the places a model looks, and keeping that description the same everywhere it appears.
- Answer-shaped content. Restructuring existing pages so the claim comes first, and writing the pages that answer the questions people actually put to a model.
- Structured data. Organization, Person, Service, Product and FAQ schema, implemented and validated rather than pasted in.
- Crawler access. Auditing robots.txt and server rules so the AI crawlers you want can reach you, and the ones you do not want cannot.
- Off-site corroboration. Getting your key facts stated somewhere other than your own website, so they can be confirmed.
How this gets measured, honestly
There is no Search Console for AI answers. Anyone showing you a precise AI ranking number is showing you an estimate, so here is what I actually do instead.
We agree a set of prompts that a real buyer would type, the ones where being named matters. I run them across the engines on a fixed schedule and record what gets named, what gets cited, and how your brand is described when it does appear. Wording drifts between runs, so the pattern over several months is the signal, not any single result.
Alongside that we watch referral traffic from AI sources in your analytics, which is small but real and growing, and the AI surfaces inside Google that Search Console does report on.
What I will not promise
- That you will be cited. These systems are probabilistic, they change without notice, and no one can guarantee an output.
- That this replaces SEO. Answer engines lean heavily on the same web they crawl, so a site with broken technical foundations loses on both fronts.
- A ranking report with a number in it. I will show you what the engines said, in their words, with the date.
Questions people ask first
Is this just SEO with a new name?
It overlaps, and anyone claiming it is entirely separate is selling something. Crawlability, structure and authority matter to both. What differs is the target: SEO competes for a position among links, GEO competes to be the source a model quotes. The content shape and the measurement are genuinely different.
Should I do this before fixing my SEO?
No. If your pages are not indexed or your site is slow and badly structured, fix that first. It is the cheaper work and it improves both outcomes at once.
Which engines do you work on?
ChatGPT, Google Gemini and AI Mode, Claude, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot. Which of them matter depends on where your buyers actually are, and we decide that before starting rather than reporting on all of them for the sake of a longer report.
How long does it take?
Structural work lands quickly, within weeks, because crawler access and schema are either right or wrong. Being reliably named takes longer, because it depends on corroboration accumulating off your site. Expect a quarter before the pattern is readable.
Find out what the engines say about you now
Send me your site and the prompts you would want to win. You get back what each engine currently says, who it names instead of you, and the reason.