What GEO is and how to get into the answers of ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants

Not long ago, someone choosing a kids’ summer camp or a bookkeeper typed a query into a search engine and opened five websites. More and more often now, they ask ChatGPT or Gemini instead: “recommend a bookkeeping service for a small business in Dubai, not too expensive, but they need to reply fast.” And they get back not a list of links but a finished answer with three or four names and a note on what each one is good at.

If your business isn’t in that answer, you aren’t in the running. People don’t scroll further, because there is nothing further to scroll. The work of making AI know about a business and name it has a name of its own: GEO.

Let’s look at where assistants get their information, how GEO differs from the SEO you already know, and what you can do right now.

What GEO is, in plain words

GEO stands for generative engine optimization: optimizing for generative systems, meaning AI that writes the answer itself. The term first appeared in 2023 in a research paper by a group of academics and quickly made its way into everyday marketing.

The goal is simple to state: when a customer asks AI about your field, the assistant should mention your business, describe it correctly and, where possible, link to it.

GEO doesn’t replace SEO. If anything, it extends it: most of what helps a website in search helps here too. But it has its own specifics, covered below.

Where AI gets its answers

Assistants have two sources of knowledge, and they define what you can influence.

Knowledge from training. The model was trained on a huge body of text from the internet, collected up to a certain date. If a lot was written about a business before that date, and it was consistent, the model may know it “from memory.” There’s no quick way to influence this: that knowledge only updates when new model versions come out.

Search at the moment of the question. Most popular assistants can search the web: ChatGPT with search, Perplexity, Gemini, AI Overviews in Google Search. The assistant runs a query, reads a few of the pages it finds and retells them. It often shows links to its sources.

The second point leads to the main idea: to get into the answer, you need to be in the pages the assistant finds and reads. That might be your website, or it might be a directory, an article in an industry publication, a review roundup or a Google Maps listing that mentions you.

How GEO differs from SEO

	SEO	GEO
Where the result shows	Your website’s position in Google results	A mention of your business in an AI answer
What the person sees	A list of links; they choose	A finished answer with several options
What matters	Your website and its pages	Your website plus everything written about you elsewhere
How to measure	Rankings, visits, inquiries	The share of questions where you get named

The main difference is scope. In SEO you mostly work on your own website. In GEO, what others say about you matters just as much: the assistant assembles its answer from several sources and is more likely to name businesses that are mentioned in different places.

What helps you get into AI answers

Pages that answer questions directly

An assistant needs a passage it can pick up and retell. A page whose first paragraph says what you do, where, for whom, how much it costs and how long it takes works much better for this than a page with a slogan and three screens of generalities.

It pays to collect the questions customers ask on calls and answer each one on your website: on service pages, in an FAQ, in articles.

The same facts everywhere

Your name, address, phone number, list of services, founding year and opening hours should match across your website, Google Business Profile, local directories and social media. If you’re “Studio Linen” in one place, “LINEN beauty studio” in another and an old address shows up in a third, the assistant may confuse you with another business or fail to connect the mentions.

Mentions on other sites

Assistants are more willing to name businesses that independent sources write about:

• reviews on Google Maps and on industry platforms;
• industry directories and rankings;
• articles in local and trade media;
• reviews, roundups, interviews;
• answers to questions on niche forums.

This isn’t about buying links. It’s about there being something to find about the business besides its own website.

A website robots can read

If AI can’t read your website, it won’t quote it. A few things are worth checking:

• The text is in the page code. If all the content appears only after scripts run, some crawlers won’t see it.
• robots.txt doesn’t block the crawlers you need. Search assistants have their own crawlers, for example OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT and PerplexityBot for Perplexity. Google’s AI answers draw on Google Search, so the regular Googlebot matters for them. Sometimes these get blocked by accident along with everything else.
• There is structured data. Schema.org markup for the organization, services and FAQs helps crawlers understand which part is the address, which is the price and which is the answer.

Solid SEO

Assistants with search rely on search indexes. A website that is poorly indexed and ranks far down gets found by AI less often. That’s why we run SEO and GEO together: a fixed error or a new service page works for both.

How to measure GEO

There are no rankings in the usual sense here, so measurement works differently.

1. We put together a list of 20–30 questions your customers actually ask: “where can I get…”, “which … should I choose”, “how much does … cost in my city.”
2. Once a month we ask them to several assistants: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Google.
3. We record whether the business is mentioned, whether it’s described correctly, who is named alongside it and which sources the assistant cites.

AI answers change from one try to the next even for the same question, so what matters isn’t a single result but the share of questions with a mention and how it moves month to month. On top of that, Google Analytics shows visits from assistant websites when someone clicks a link in an answer.

What GEO doesn’t promise

No one can guarantee that AI will name you in answer to a specific question. Assistants choose their own sources and wording, and the way they work changes regularly. Results build up gradually: pages get indexed, mentions appear, reviews accumulate.

GEO also won’t fix a weak product. If a business has a lot of complaints, the assistant will retell those too.

We run SEO and GEO together for $390 a month: technical order on the website, new pages built around customer questions, consistent facts about the business across platforms, a monthly check of AI mentions and a report. More on the SEO + GEO page. How regular search optimization works is covered in SEO in plain words.

The short version

• GEO is the work of getting ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI to name your business in their answers.
• Assistants answer from training knowledge and from pages they find in search at the moment of the question; the second is the one you can influence faster.
• What helps: pages with direct answers, the same facts about the business on every platform, independent mentions and a website robots can read.
• GEO and SEO draw on the same sources, so it makes sense to run them together.
• Measure the share of questions where you get named and how it changes; no one can guarantee a mention.