Get found by search engines and the AI tools people ask instead

Generative engine optimization is the practice of making a brand visible inside AI-generated answers, rather than only in a list of links. It is sometimes called AI search optimization or answer engine optimization (AEO)

Where traditional SEO aims for a ranking position, GEO aims to be named, cited, or recommended when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overviews a question. The work overlaps heavily with SEO, because most AI systems retrieve from search results before generating an answer.

It is neither entirely. Around 38% of Google AI Overview citations come from pages already ranking in the top ten, so strong SEO does most of the work. But roughly a third of cited pages do not rank in the top ten at all, which means rank alone does not explain citation.

The additional layer is structure and entity clarity: content a model can extract a clean fact from, consistent identity signals across the web, and corroboration from independent sources. Any agency telling you GEO replaces SEO is selling something. Any agency telling you it is identical has not looked at the data.

Most work through retrieval-augmented generation: the system searches, retrieves a set of candidate pages, ranks them, extracts facts, and writes an answer from what it pulled. Pages get selected on relevance to the query, how clearly they can be parsed, whether the entity is recognisable, and how much the source is trusted.

Two practical consequences. First, structured content with direct answers, tables, and defined terms gets extracted more readily than long persuasive prose. Second, brands that appear repeatedly across many sources form what researchers call a citation cluster, and those brands get reused in future answers on related questions.

Worth noting: none of the major providers publish their exact selection criteria. Anyone quoting precise weightings is working from reverse-engineered estimates, and we will tell you which parts of this are measured and which are inferred.

It reduces clicks overall. Research has found people are less likely to click a traditional result when an AI summary appears. But the picture is not uniformly bad: Seer Interactive found that being cited inside an AI Overview produced 120% more organic clicks per impression compared with not being cited, plus a lift in paid clicks.

The takeaway is that the cost of being invisible went up. Fewer total clicks are available, and a larger share of them go to whoever is named in the answer.

Technical fixes and Google Business Profile work can move local visibility within weeks. Competitive organic rankings generally take three to six months to show meaningful movement, and longer in crowded markets.

AI citation tends to lag both, because it depends on corroboration accumulating across sources. Anyone promising AI visibility in thirty days is describing something they cannot control.

Search engines favour sites that stay active, and AI systems lean on sources that keep answering current questions. A site that has not changed in two years is competing against businesses publishing monthly.

That does not mean blogging for its own sake. It means adding pages that answer real questions your customers ask, keeping service and location pages accurate, and refreshing anything that has gone stale. Volume matters less than whether each piece has a job.

Yes, and they work better together than apart. Paid ads buy you visibility today while SEO earns it over months, so the two cover different parts of the same timeline.

They also feed each other. Search term data from your ad campaigns shows exactly which queries convert, which sharpens your SEO targeting. Your Google Business Profile powers both the local pack and Local Services Ads. And once organic rankings hold for a term, you can often reduce spend on it and move budget somewhere still uncontested.

Rank tracking alone does not work here, because AI answers vary by prompt wording, timing, and user context. We track four things instead:

• Citation rate — how often your site is linked as a source
• Mention rate — how often your brand is named without a link
• Competitor share — who else appears for the same prompts
• Engine split — where you show up, since ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity behave differently

These sit alongside conventional rankings, map pack positions, and traffic, not instead of them.

It depends on which crawlers, and the distinction matters. Some crawlers gather training data. Others fetch pages live to answer a user’s question right now. Blocking the first has little effect on your visibility. Blocking the second removes you from AI answers entirely.

Publishers with content worth licensing often block training crawlers deliberately. Most service businesses and e-commerce sites want to be found, and should allow retrieval crawlers. We will walk through your robots.txt and make the call with you rather than applying a blanket default.

For anything with local intent it is often the whole game. The map pack sits above organic results, and your Google Business Profile drives it: categories, service areas, hours, photos, posts, and review volume and recency.

That same profile feeds Local Services Ads, which appear above the map pack and are covered on our Google Ads and LSA page. Assistants also lean on business profile data when answering “who should I call near me” questions, so profile accuracy now affects three surfaces at once.

Yes. We are Michigan based and work with clients nationwide, including national B2B and e-commerce where there is no local pack to compete for. The work differs by model, not by geography.