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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Contents
SEO optimises for a ranking on the results page; AEO optimises for a mention inside the answer.
Read →The AI-generated answer box above Google's results, and what it means for your traffic.
Read →What search-grounded ChatGPT actually does before it names a brand in its answer.
Read →Tell us your domain and we'll send you a visibility report — free, no card.