What is GEO? Generative Engine Optimisation, explained

When someone asks ChatGPT for "the best accountants in Manchester", the answer names a handful of firms. GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is the practice of making sure your business is one of them.

The shift from links to answers

Classic search gives a page of links and lets the searcher choose. Generative engines — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity — give an answer. The assistant reads a handful of sources, synthesises them, and names a small number of brands. If you are not in the answer, there is no page two.

What GEO actually involves

GEO is not a bag of tricks. Generative engines choose sources roughly the way a careful researcher would, so the work looks like good marketing done thoroughly:

• Be the best answer to real questions. Engines cite pages that directly, clearly answer the question asked — not homepages, but specific, useful pages.
• Be present where engines look. AI assistants lean heavily on sources they trust: established publications, review platforms, and discussion sites like Reddit and Quora.
• Be consistent. Your name, what you do, and where you do it should read the same everywhere the engine might look.

How GEO differs from SEO

SEO optimises for a ranking; GEO optimises for a mention. They overlap — pages that rank well are often cited — but they are measured completely differently. A ranking is a position you can check. A mention only exists inside an answer, which changes every time the question is asked. That is why GEO needs its own measurement: asking the engines the questions your customers ask, repeatedly, and tracking whether you appear.

Measuring GEO

You cannot improve what you cannot see. Measurement means tracking visibility and share of voice across engines, seeing which pages earn citations, and watching whether changes you publish move the numbers on the next scan. That is the job Referenced does.

Related terms

You will also see AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and LLMO (Large Language Model Optimisation). They describe the same discipline with slightly different emphasis — see AEO vs SEO for how the terminology shakes out.