Introduction: The Shift From Search to Generation
For decades, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been the cornerstone of digital visibility. Businesses optimized their content to rank highly in search engine results, mostly on Google, because that’s where people went for answers.
But the rise of AI-driven tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, and others has changed the game. Increasingly, people aren’t just searching for information, they’re asking AI for direct answers, recommendations, and insights. In this new paradigm, traditional SEO isn’t enough.
Enter Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) — the emerging discipline of optimising your content so it is discoverable and favourably represented in AI-generated responses.
What Is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
GEO refers to strategies and techniques aimed at ensuring your content is recognised, interpreted, and included by AI systems (like ChatGPT) when they generate answers or recommendations.
Rather than optimising for a list of ranked search results, GEO is about optimising for:
- Inclusion: Does your brand or content appear in AI-generated responses?
- Attribution: Are you credited as a source?
- Contextual relevance: Are you positioned accurately and favorably?
- Trust signals: Are you considered a credible, high-quality source?
This is not merely SEO 2.0, it’s a parallel but complementary strategy tailored to how LLMs (large language models) and AI systems generate knowledge and responses.
Why GEO Matters Now
- AI is the new interface to the internet.
- Millions now ask ChatGPT or other AI systems questions that used to be typed into Google.
- AI platforms are often zero-click environments: users get answers without needing to browse websites.
- If your content doesn’t inform the AI’s response, you’re invisible.
- Recommendation systems are evolving.
- Instead of search result pages, users get AI-curated answers or lists (e.g., “best CRM tools for small business”).
- If you’re not part of that curated list, you’re missing out on traffic, conversions, and visibility.
- AI systems are building “mental models” of your brand.
- LLMs are trained on massive corpora of text and often fine-tuned with human feedback.
- What’s said about your brand across the web, on forums, reviews, Wikipedia, news articles, shapes how AIs represent you.
- ChatGPT now integrates with the web and plugins.
- Tools like ChatGPT’s browsing mode and third-party plugins/extensions mean AI can fetch real-time data.
- Optimizing your structured data, open graph tags, and APIs can influence how your content is presented in these environments.
GEO vs Traditional SEO: Key Differences
| Feature | SEO | GEO |
|---|---|---|
| Optimised For | Search engine algorithms (e.g. Google) | Generative AI models (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude) |
| Visibility Format | Ranked lists of clickable links | Synthesized, natural-language answers |
| Ranking Factors | Keywords, backlinks, Core Web Vitals | Training data presence, structured data, citations, trustworthiness |
| Interaction | Users click to explore sites | Users often stay within the AI interface |
| Metrics | Impressions, CTR, page rank | Inclusion in AI output, citation, mention frequency |
How to Optimise for Generative Engines Like ChatGPT
- Create high-quality, original content across multiple formats.
- AI pulls from a wide range of sources: blogs, PDFs, reviews, FAQs, wikis, forums.
- The more diverse and detailed your content, the more likely it is to be ingested and referenced by LLMs.
- Leverage structured data and schema markup.
- Use Schema.org markup to make your content machine-readable.
- This helps AI engines understand your site’s content better and extract facts reliably.
- Be present on authoritative platforms.
- Get featured in Wikipedia, Quora, Reddit, Stack Overflow, industry blogs, trusted media.
- These are disproportionately represented in LLM training datasets.
- Develop a strong digital reputation.
- Encourage third-party sites and forums to mention and link to your brand.
- Focus on reviews, expert commentary, and testimonials.
- Keep technical SEO clean and modern.
- Though GEO is distinct from SEO, solid SEO practices like fast load times, mobile responsiveness, and canonical URLs still help ensure discoverability and crawlability.
- Understand LLM behavior and biases.
- Models like ChatGPT rely on patterns. If you’re consistently described as “the top cybersecurity firm for startups” across several sources, that phrasing is more likely to be echoed.
- Think in terms of how you want to be described, not just ranked.
How SEO Still Plays a Role in GEO
SEO and GEO are interconnected. Here’s how SEO tactics contribute to GEO:
- Backlinks and mentions still help boost your authority, AI models treat frequently linked and mentioned sources as trustworthy.
- Optimised titles and meta descriptions improve how your content is summarised in browsing-augmented responses.
- High domain authority increases the likelihood of your site being cited or scraped for future training or retrieval-augmented generation.
If ChatGPT uses browsing, or tools like Perplexity or Bing Chat do real-time retrieval, your SEO optimisations directly affect what gets pulled in.
Challenges and Unknowns in GEO
- Opaque model behaviour: You can’t fully know what data was used to train an AI or why it responds the way it does.
- Limited real-time indexing: Most LLMs are trained on data that’s months or years old.
- No clear “ranking” metrics yet: There’s no AI-equivalent of Google Search Console… yet.
Still, as companies like OpenAI explore memory, web integration, and citation systems, it’s likely tools will emerge to help analyze and improve GEO performance.
Preparing for the AI-First Web
The future of digital visibility is not just about ranking on search engines, it’s about being included in the outputs of the AI systems people trust. Whether users are shopping, researching, troubleshooting, or comparing, they’re increasingly turning to AI-first tools.
Generative Engine Optimisation is your pathway to staying visible, relevant, and influential in this evolving digital landscape.