What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
GEO is the practice of optimising your content and brand signals so that AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini — recommend you in their responses.
What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the practice of optimising your brand's content, structured data, and authority signals so that AI answer engines — including ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini — recommend you in their generated responses.
Why GEO matters now
Traditional SEO focuses on ranking in a list of blue links. AI answer engines work differently: they synthesise an answer from multiple sources and may recommend one brand, product, or service directly — with no list of alternatives for the user to scroll through.
If your brand is not in the AI's training data or retrieval context, it simply does not exist in that answer. That is a zero-click loss you cannot recover with better page titles.
How GEO differs from SEO
| Traditional SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank in search results | Be cited/recommended in AI answers |
| Signals | Backlinks, keywords, technical health | Entity authority, structured data, topical coverage |
| Measurement | Rank position, click-through rate | Share of Model, citation frequency |
| Timeframe | Weeks to months | Weeks to months (similar) |
The good news: the fundamentals overlap. High-quality, well-structured content with clear entity signals helps both traditional SEO and GEO. GEO adds a layer on top.
The five pillars of GEO
1. Share-of-Model measurement
Before optimising, you need to measure. Share of Model is the percentage of relevant AI responses in which your brand appears. Track it across all major engines, segment by prompt type, and benchmark against competitors.
2. Entity clarity
AI models build internal knowledge graphs. If your brand, its products, and its key people are ambiguous or contradictory across the web, AI engines will hedge or avoid citing you. Clear, consistent entity signals — reinforced by JSON-LD, Wikidata entries, and consistent co-citation — build the confidence AI needs to recommend you.
3. Topical authority
AI engines retrieve content from the sources they trust most. Building genuine topical authority — comprehensive, accurate, well-cited coverage of your domain — is the most durable GEO signal there is.
4. Technical accessibility
If AI crawlers cannot access your content, they cannot cite it. llms.txt, correct robots.txt policy (allowing GPTBot, ClaudeBot, CCBot), structured data, and fast rendering all matter.
5. E-E-A-T signals
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness are Google's framework, but they translate directly to GEO. AI models are trained on corpora that reward these signals. Author bios, original research, real credentials, and genuine external citations all contribute.
What GEO is not
GEO done correctly does not involve:
- Prompt injection (embedding hidden text to manipulate AI responses)
- Fake reviews or fabricated social proof
- Automated community posting on behalf of brands
- Cloaking — serving different content to AI crawlers than to humans
These techniques violate provider terms, search engine guidelines, and in several jurisdictions, consumer protection law. They also tend to backfire as AI providers improve their spam detection.
Getting started
The fastest way to start is to measure where you stand. Tools like GEO.actor track your Share of Model across all five major engines, identify the gaps, and prioritise the fixes with the highest expected impact.
A free plan is available — no credit card required.