GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation, sometimes called AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) — is the practice of making a site visible and accurately represented inside AI-generated answers: Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT search, Perplexity, and the growing number of assistants that summarise the web instead of just linking to it. It sits alongside traditional SEO rather than replacing it, but it requires its own technical and content work.
Where classic SEO optimises for ranking position in a list of blue links, GEO optimises for whether an AI system can find your content, trust it enough to cite it, and represent it accurately when a user never clicks through to your site at all. That means structured data an LLM can parse cleanly, content written to directly answer the questions people ask, clear authorship and factual grounding, and machine-readable signals like an llms.txt file that tell AI crawlers what your site is and does.
We do this work as an extension of our existing SEO service, not a separate bolt-on — the technical SEO foundation (crawlability, structured data, site speed, clean information architecture) is the same foundation GEO is built on.
GEO built on real technical SEO foundations
AI crawlers rely on the same crawlability, speed and structured-data fundamentals as traditional search — we don't treat GEO as disconnected from SEO.
Structured data and schema expertise
Organization, FAQPage, Article and Service schema implemented properly, giving AI systems clean, unambiguous data to cite.
llms.txt and AI-crawler configuration
We build llms.txt files and configure robots.txt to deliberately allow the AI crawlers worth being visible to, rather than leaving it to default behaviour.
Content structured for direct answers
FAQ sections, clear headings and direct-answer paragraphs written so an AI system can lift an accurate answer straight from the page.
Why GEO matters even if most of your traffic is still "normal" search
It's tempting to treat GEO as a future problem while AI Overviews and chat-based search are still a minority of total search volume. But the practice that makes a site GEO-ready — clean structured data, direct-answer content, clear entity relationships, genuine topical authority — is also good, durable traditional SEO practice. There's very little GEO work that doesn't also improve how Google's own algorithm understands your site.
The bigger risk of waiting is being invisible in an AI-generated answer that a competitor is cited in instead, on a query where you'd have ranked well in classic search. As more search volume shifts to zero-click AI answers, that citation is increasingly the only visibility available on a given query — there's no page two to fall back to.
What's the difference between SEO and GEO?
SEO optimises for ranking position in traditional search results. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) optimises for whether AI systems like AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity can find, trust and accurately cite your content in a generated answer. They share the same technical foundation but need distinct content and structured-data work.
What is an llms.txt file?
It's a markdown file, following the emerging llmstxt.org convention, that gives AI crawlers a clear, structured summary of what your site is and what's on it — similar in spirit to a sitemap, but written for language models rather than search-engine indexers.
Can you measure GEO results the way you measure SEO rankings?
Not with the same precision yet — there's no universal "AI Overview rank tracker" equivalent to traditional rank tracking. We monitor citation appearances manually and via emerging tools, and report on the structural and technical work completed alongside it.
Do I need GEO if I already do regular SEO?
GEO builds on your existing SEO foundation rather than replacing it. If your technical SEO and structured data are already strong, GEO work is a more targeted addition; if they're weak, GEO work will improve both simultaneously.