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Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of increasing how often an AI answer engine names a brand in the response it writes for a user's question. Where search engine optimisation competes for a position in a ranked list of links, GEO competes for a mention inside a single generated paragraph.
GEO, SEO and AEO are not the same job
The three overlap enough to be confused and differ enough to be measured separately.
SEO optimises for placement in a ranked list. Success is a position, and there are ten of them on a page. Being eighth still earns traffic.
AEO, answer engine optimisation, is the older and narrower discipline of winning the direct answer — a featured snippet, a knowledge panel, a voice result. It is usually a single extracted passage from a single page.
GEO covers responses that a language model composes from several retrieved sources. Nothing is extracted verbatim, the sources are blended, and the output names a small set of brands. You are either in that set or you are not represented at all.
The practical consequence: SEO reporting tells you where you rank, and neither ranking nor snippet ownership tells you whether an engine recommends you.
How an answer engine picks the brands it names
For a buy-intent question, the engine runs retrieval, pulls a handful of documents, and generates a response grounded in them. Two properties of that process decide who gets named.
The retrieved set is small — typically a few documents, not a few hundred. And retrieval favours documents that already answer the question in the shape it was asked. A ranked shortlist question retrieves ranked shortlists. A comparison question retrieves comparisons.
Your product page, which describes one product to a visitor who has already chosen your brand, matches neither shape.
The three levers that move a citation rate
Entity resolution
The engine needs a stable object to attach a recommendation to. That means consistent naming across your own pages, Organization and Product structured data, Offer and review markup where they apply, and sameAs links to the external profiles that confirm the brand exists. Without this the engine has a set of pages rather than a company it can name.
Comparison coverage
Publish the pages that answer comparison and shortlist questions directly, including honest trade-offs against named competitors. A page that only flatters you is not usable as a source, because the engine is assembling a balanced answer and will reach for something balanced.
Third-party citations
Engines weight independent sources above your own domain. Category roundups, editorial reviews, forum threads, and retailer listings are what corroborate a claim. When you are absent from all of them, the engine still answers — it simply cites the brands that third parties wrote about.
How GEO performance is measured
Because engines sample from a language model and re-run retrieval per request, two identical questions minutes apart can return different brands. A single check is noise in either direction.
The workable metric is citation frequency: ask the same question a fixed number of times and count how often the brand appears. A rate of 7 out of 25 is a fact you can re-measure and defend. "We appear in ChatGPT" is a claim a prospect can disprove in thirty seconds.
Useful things to track alongside it:
- Competitor citation rate on the same queries, which turns an abstract score into a gap.
- Cited source domains, which is a concrete list of places to go and appear.
- Rate by prompt cluster — discovery, comparison, validation, shortlist, attribute — because a brand strong on validation questions and absent from shortlists has a specific, fixable problem.
How long GEO changes take to show up
Changes that live on your own pages — structured data, comparison content, clearer entity signals — typically appear in answers within two to six weeks, as the engine's index refreshes.
Changes that depend on third-party sources take longer, because they only register once the source publishes and is itself re-crawled. Budget a quarter, not a fortnight, and re-scan on a fixed schedule so you can see the direction rather than argue about it.