GEO · Basics What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?

What GEO means

GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. It covers everything that helps generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Microsoft Copilot or Google with AI Mode and AI Overviews name a business when it fits the question. The term comes from a 2023 research paper by Princeton University and other institutes, presented at the KDD 2024 conference.

The same idea goes by several names: AEO (answer engine optimisation), LLMO (large language model optimisation), AI SEO or LLM SEO. The differences are mostly about wording. In every case the aim is to appear in an AI’s answers and to be described accurately there.

How AI answers are created

To understand what GEO can achieve, it helps to look at where an AI gets its knowledge. There are two routes, and in practice they mix:

• Training knowledge: the language model read large amounts of text during training. Whatever appeared often and consistently about your business, it knows. This knowledge is often months old.
• Live web search: for many questions the system searches the web, reads a few pages and summarises them. ChatGPT uses the OAI-SearchBot crawler for this, Perplexity uses PerplexityBot, Claude uses Claude-SearchBot and Google uses its regular search.

For businesses the second route matters more, because you can influence it. If you block the crawlers, have pages that are hard to read or appear in none of the sources that get cited, you will not be named.

GEO and SEO compared

What stays the same

In its guidance on AI features, Google states explicitly that there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A page has to be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet. The familiar basics still apply: crawlable pages, internal links, text rather than images alone, and structured data that matches the visible content.

For you this means: good search engine optimisation is the foundation of GEO. If Google can barely find you, AI systems with web search will rarely name you either.

What changes

Still, a few things shift, and that is where GEO comes in:

• Answers instead of lists: an AI often names only three to five providers. There is no position eleven.
• Reputation counts more than your own site: the AI reads what others write about you: review platforms, directories, trade articles, forums. Your website is one source among many.
• Consistent data: contradictory addresses, opening hours or services across directories lead to wrong or cautious answers.
• Questions instead of keywords: customers write “Which accountant in Manchester knows the hospitality sector?”. Pages that answer such questions directly are more likely to be cited.
• Evidence works: in the study mentioned above, content with cited sources, quotations and specific figures performed best. Simply adding keywords barely helped.

What you can do yourself

You can handle much of this without an agency. These points usually make the biggest difference:

• Check in your robots.txt that OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude-SearchBot and Googlebot are allowed.
• Create a separate page for each service that says in its first sentences what you offer, for whom and where.
• Answer your five most common customer questions on the website, in full sentences.
• Align name, address, phone number, opening hours and services in your Google Business Profile, Bing Places and the main industry directories.
• Add structured data for your organisation or local business (Schema.org).
• Actively ask satisfied customers for reviews and reply to reviews.
• Publish your own figures, examples and evidence instead of generic marketing copy.
• Once a month, ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity the same customer questions and note who gets named.

Where an agency helps

Three things get difficult: measuring reliably, implementing the technical side cleanly and finding out which sources are actually cited in your industry. A single question to ChatGPT tells you little, because answers vary. Results only become meaningful when many questions go to several systems several times.

That is exactly what we do as a GEO agency: the check is free and the Location Analysis costs €229 plus VAT. Implementation of crawler access, structured data, profiles and content starts at €390 plus VAT, and we agree scope and fixed price in writing beforehand.

Limits you should know

Nobody can guarantee that an AI will name your business. The systems phrase every answer anew, take location and timing into account and change constantly. The only honest statement is therefore something like “named in 6 of 10 answers”, never “number one in ChatGPT”. Be careful with offers that promise fixed placements.