The explainer
What is GEO?
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the work of getting AI assistants to name your business when someone asks them for a recommendation. Mostly, it means making the facts about you consistent and easy to check.
How it's measured
How it's measured
What happens when someone asks an AI, and how we turn that into a number.
The question panel
We write twelve questions your customers ask in some form every day, the way people actually type them: casual, abbreviated, sometimes misspelt. The panel then stays identical for months, because a question set that keeps changing makes the comparison worthless.
One assistant, with the web on
Every question goes to Claude, with live web search on, in a fresh session, the way a buyer would ask it. Answers vary between runs, so no single answer is treated as a verdict: the reading is dated, and what carries weight is the pattern across twelve questions, and with monitoring across months.
The evaluation
For every answer we record whether you were named, whether you were named first, and who else got named alongside you. We keep every answer verbatim, with the pages it read, so the evidence behind any number is there to read, and we send it when you ask.
The visibility score
What comes out is a number between 0 and 100: your visibility score, the share of the twelve questions that named you. Named in 3 of 12 is 25. With monitoring, we re-measure it every month with the same questions.
SEO vs. GEO
A page of links, against a paragraph that names three businesses.
The best fit is your business , clearly described, well reviewed and consistent everywhere.
- Ten links to choose fromOne paragraph, two or three names
- The game is clicksThe game is recommendations
- Ranking high wins visitorsBeing named wins trust
- Result: you pick from a shortlistResult: advice people follow
- Contested for twenty yearsStill being decided now
What it depends on
Four things decide whether you get named.
Content shaped like an answer
An assistant lifts answers from pages that already contain them. A short paragraph that answers one question completely gets quoted; a page that says "quality service since 1998" gives it nothing to work with. In our audit of 9,483 small business sites, 61.5% had no question-and-answer content of any kind.
An identity it can pin down
One name, one address, one phone number, repeated everywhere the business appears. An assistant deciding whether to name you wants to be sure it is naming one business rather than three. 43.1% of the sites we audited contradicted themselves across their own three main pages.
Reviews a machine can read
Most of these businesses have dozens of reviews. The assistant reading their site does not know, because the site never says so: 64.7% showed no review signal a crawler could read, and only 8.9% carried rating markup.
Mentions somewhere that is not you
Being named in trade press, directories and other people's pages is what an assistant weighs when your own site is the only thing claiming you are good. It has to be real coverage rather than something you paid to say about yourself.
Common questions
What people ask before they believe any of this.
What does GEO stand for?
Generative Engine Optimization. It is also called Answer Engine Optimization, or just AI visibility. All three name the same work: getting a business named inside the answers AI assistants write, rather than ranked in a list of links.
Is GEO different from SEO?
They share a foundation and diverge after it. A fast, crawlable, well-structured site helps both. After that SEO competes for a position among links, while GEO competes to be one of two or three businesses named inside a written answer where there is no second page. What an assistant needs is facts it can attribute, quote and verify — not a page that outranks a directory.
Does GEO replace SEO?
No. People still use search engines, and the work that makes a site legible to a crawler makes it legible to an assistant too. Treat GEO as the thing that covers the growing share of buyers who ask an assistant first, not as a replacement for the channel that still brings the rest.
Is there any evidence GEO works?
Yes, and it is worth checking rather than taking on trust. The academic baseline is "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" by Aggarwal and colleagues at Princeton, Georgia Tech, IIT Delhi and the Allen Institute for AI, presented at ACM SIGKDD 2024: tested against live generative engines, citing sources, adding statistics and adding quotations raised a source's odds of being cited by up to about 40%, while keyword stuffing did nothing. Our own audit of 9,483 sites points the same way from the other end.
How long does GEO take to show anything?
Four to eight weeks before a fixed question panel shows movement, and about three months before a change is big enough to argue with. Assistants pick up new information on a delay. The compensation is that it is equally slow to undo: a business that has become the named answer takes real work to displace.
Can I do this myself?
Most of it, yes. Putting your name, address and phone in one form on every page, marking up the business rather than the website, publishing your reviews as text and as markup, and writing real answers to the five questions customers ask on the phone — none of that needs an agency. What is harder to do alone is knowing whether it worked, which is the measurement, and earning mentions on sites you do not control.
Which assistants matter for this?
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity are the ones buyers use today, and Google's AI Overviews sit on top of ordinary Search results rather than being a separate system to court. Our measurement asks Claude, with live web search on, and says so beside every result; the fixes are for the pages all of them read. The set will change. That is an argument for measuring rather than for guessing which one to optimise for.
Sources: Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, KDD 2024 · Google Search Central, AI features and your website · our audit of 9,483 small-business sites
Try it yourself.
Open ChatGPT. Ask: "What's the best [your industry] in [your city]?" We'll wait.