What is GEO? Generative Engine Optimization, explained for founders

Ask ChatGPT "what's the best running sock for marathons" and you don't get a page of links — you get an answer with two or three brands in it. The same thing happens when a procurement engineer asks for suppliers, or when someone asks which physio to book nearby. The answer is the new search results page, and most businesses have no idea how they'd get into it.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the discipline of earning a place in those answers.

How AI engines choose who to name

Generative engines don't rank pages; they synthesize answers from sources they trust. In practice, whether you get named comes down to three things:

Machine-readable structure. Engines need to understand what you are — your products, specs, prices, service area — as entities, not paragraphs. Schema markup, consistent naming, and clean information architecture do the heavy lifting.
Answer-shaped content. Models quote content that already answers the question. Pages built around the real questions buyers ask get cited; brochure pages don't.
Corroboration. Engines cross-check. Reviews, third-party mentions, directories, and press are the citations that make a model confident enough to recommend you by name.

How GEO differs from SEO

SEO optimizes for being ranked — position four is still a win. GEO optimizes for being quoted — there is no position four in a three-name answer. The foundations overlap (crawlability, authority, structure), but GEO adds a harder test: your claims have to be specific, sourced, and consistent everywhere the model looks, because models average across everything they can find about you.

That's also why fabricated or vague marketing claims quietly hurt: a model that finds inconsistency deprioritizes you as a source.

Where to start

Run the audit before touching anything: ask the major assistants the twenty questions your buyers actually ask, and record who gets named. That's your share of answer, and it's usually a shock. Then work the three levers above in order — structure first, answer-content second, corroboration third.

Or let us run it for you: our free scan shows exactly where you appear today, who owns your category's answers, and the gap between.