Ask ten people what GEO stands for and you will get ten slightly different definitions, which tells you how new this discipline is. Here is ours: generative engine optimisation is the work of getting your company named when an AI assistant answers your customers' questions.
That is the whole thing. Everything else is technique.
What actually changed
For twenty years, finding a product or a service meant typing a few words into a search box and scanning a page of links. The links competed for your click, and an entire industry, SEO, grew up around winning that competition.
Then assistants arrived. When someone asks ChatGPT which project management tool suits a small construction firm, or asks Perplexity who makes the most durable hiking boots, they do not get ten links. They get a short, confident answer that names one, two, maybe three companies. Google itself now answers many searches the same way, with an AI Overview sitting above the results it used to send you to.
The competition did not disappear. It moved. It used to happen on the results page, in front of the customer. Now it happens inside the model, before the customer ever sees anything.
Why this is bigger than it looks
A results page is forgiving. Position four still gets traffic. A distinctive brand can win the click from below a bigger rival. An answer is not forgiving. If the assistant names two companies and you are the third, you were never in the conversation, and you will not appear in any analytics report as a lost visitor. You simply were not mentioned.
Ten blue links had room for everyone. An answer has room for one or two names.
The upside is just as sharp. Companies that are consistently named become the default. The assistant recommends them, the customer arrives already half convinced, and every conversation starts warmer.
What GEO work actually involves
In practice, the work breaks into four parts.
- Knowing what the engines say. Asking them your buyers' questions, at scale and on a schedule, and recording who gets named.
- Being readable and trustworthy. Structured data, clear entity signals and pages that answer questions directly instead of burying the answer under a thousand words of preamble.
- Being cited elsewhere. Engines lean heavily on sources they already trust: review platforms, industry publications, directories and communities. If those sources do not mention you, the engine has little reason to.
- Measuring what it produces. Share of answer, assistant referred traffic and the enquiries behind it.
Is this just SEO with a new name?
Partly, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Good technical foundations, useful content and a real reputation help you in both worlds. But the emphasis shifts hard. Rankings stop being the goal. Evidence, consistency across the wider web, and being quotable matter far more, and some old SEO habits, like publishing large volumes of thin keyword pages, now actively work against you.
If you want to know where you stand today, that is exactly what our free audit shows you: the questions your buyers ask, the names the engines give, and the distance between them and you.