What is Generative Engine Optimisation?
A growing share of buying decisions now begins with a question to an AI assistant. Generative Engine Optimisation — GEO — is the practice of making sure your brand is the answer that comes back.
The shift, in one sentence
For twenty years, being found meant ranking on Google so someone would click through to you. Increasingly, your buyer doesn't click at all. They ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity — "what's the best supplier for X?", "is this brand any good?", "what should I use for Y?" — and the model answers with a short, confident recommendation. If your name isn't in that answer, you've lost the sale before you knew it existed.
So what is GEO, exactly?
GEO is the set of techniques that influence whether, and how, a generative engine mentions and recommends you. It works on two distinct things, and confusing them is the most common mistake:
- Being recommended — your brand named in the answer text itself.
- Being cited — your own pages used as the source an answer-engine links to.
These have different levers. Citation can move quickly by fixing what your site says and how it's structured. Recommendation depends far more on what the rest of the web says about you — the reviews, roundups, forums and editorial that models treat as consensus.
Why it's winnable right now
The models largely synthesise from the open web they can retrieve. That means you can influence the outcome by being present, accurate and well-described in the sources they trust. And because most organisations — especially in B2B — have done nothing here, the field is wide open in a way search hasn't been for two decades.
The honest caveat. Generative engines are non-deterministic: ask the same question twice and you may get different answers. Anyone promising you a fixed "ranking" is overselling. The work is real, but it has to be measured with confidence intervals, not certainties — which is exactly how we approach it.
Where to start
Begin by listing the questions your buyers actually ask, then measure how the engines answer them today. That baseline tells you whether you have a problem worth solving — and almost every supplier we audit discovers they do.