GEO (generative engine optimisation)
GEO is the practice of making sure the AI tools that generate a written answer, rather than just listing links, describe you accurately when they do it.
Generative engine optimisation covers the same territory as AEO from a slightly different angle. AEO asks whether your page gets picked as the source. GEO asks whether the sentence a generative tool writes about you, once it has read whatever it could find, actually matches reality. Get the second one wrong and the tool can cite a real source and still say something false, because it is generating a paragraph, not quoting one.
I saw this directly with a speaking client. Asked who represents her, two different AI systems named a bureau she had already left, whose own profile page for her now redirects to its homepage. The AI was not lying on purpose. It found an old page, treated it as current, and generated a confident sentence out of stale material. That is a GEO failure: the facts on the open web had not been corrected loudly enough for the generative tool to notice the change.
GEO work is mostly about closing that gap between what is true now and what is easiest for a machine to find. That means updating or removing the stale pages you control, and building the newer, correct pages up with enough signal, real content, inbound links, consistent facts, that they outweigh the old ones in whatever the tool reads.
Why it matters to you
A generated answer reads as authoritative even when it is wrong. Nobody double-checks a paragraph from ChatGPT the way they would question a stranger’s opinion. If that paragraph gets your representation, your service area, or your specialty wrong, the person reading it walks away misinformed and you never find out, because there is no comment section to correct.
This is worse for smaller or newer businesses. A big brand has enough correct material scattered across the web to drown out an old mistake. A small practice or a single consultant might have exactly one page saying the wrong thing, and that page becomes the whole story a generative tool tells.
How I set it up
I run the actual audience-style questions through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode and read the generated answers line by line, noting anything false, outdated, or attributed to the wrong source. Then I go fix the underlying fact at the source: a corrected bio page, an updated bureau listing, a booking page that states plainly what the old page got wrong.
I also make sure the correct version has more weight behind it than the incorrect one, more recent content, a clearer structure, better inbound links, so the next time a generative tool reads the web, the right story wins.
What it looks like in practice
I re-run the same questions weeks later. Where a tool once invented a fee or named the wrong bureau, it now states the real number and the real representation, sourced from your own site. That is the whole test. Nobody sees the fix happen. They just stop hearing the wrong story.
Questions I get about this
- Isn't GEO the same thing as AEO?
- They sit next to each other and I treat them as one job in practice. AEO is about being the source an answer is pulled from. GEO is about how a generative tool, ChatGPT writing a paragraph rather than Google showing a snippet, describes you inside that generated text. Fixing the underlying facts and structure on your site improves both at once.
- How does an AI even decide what to say about my business?
- It reads whatever it can find, your site, directory listings, review sites, old press, and blends it into a paragraph. If your own site is thin, the blend leans on other people's descriptions of you, which is how a client ends up being credited to the wrong bureau or the wrong city.
- Do I need a large site for GEO to work?
- No. A small site with a handful of clear, honest, well-linked pages beats a large site full of vague copy. What generative tools reward is a confident, specific, correctly-linked answer, not word count.
Where this fits in our work
Want this set up properly for your business?
This is the kind of thing I build every week. Grab a time and we will talk through what fits.