A growing share of product research no longer starts with ten blue links. People ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google's AI Overviews a question and read a single synthesized answer. If your brand isn't in that answer, you don't get a click to lose — you were never on the page.
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the work of making sure AI answer engines can find you, understand you, and describe you accurately.
How it differs from SEO
SEO and GEO overlap a lot, but they optimize for different outcomes:
| SEO | GEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Rank a page | Get cited or named in an answer |
| Reader | A person scanning results | A model assembling a response |
| Win condition | The click | The mention — and an accurate one |
That last row matters. With classic search, a bad result is just a lower ranking. With AI answers, a model can confidently state the wrong price, an old feature list, or a competitor's positioning as yours.
What answer engines seem to reward
Nobody outside these companies knows the exact weighting, but a few patterns hold up consistently:
- Content that's readable without JavaScript. Many AI crawlers fetch raw HTML. If your key copy only appears after client-side rendering, it may not exist to them.
- Direct, quotable statements. "X does Y for Z" is easier to lift into an answer than three paragraphs of brand voice.
- Structured data. Schema.org markup tells a machine, unambiguously, what a page is about and who's behind it.
- Consistency across the web. If your site, your listings and third-party reviews disagree, models have to guess.
- Freshness. Dated, clearly-updated pages give a model a reason to prefer your version of the facts.
The shift in one line: you're no longer only writing for people who click — you're writing for the model that decides whether they ever see you.
Where to start
You don't need a new stack to begin. A first pass looks like this:
- Ask three or four AI assistants the questions your customers ask. Note whether you appear, and whether what they say is true.
- Check that your most important pages render their core content in plain HTML.
- Add
Organization,ProductorPersonstructured data where it fits. - Rewrite your key pages so the first paragraph answers the obvious question directly.
- Repeat monthly — model answers drift as they're retrained and re-indexed.
What's next
In upcoming posts I'll go deeper on measuring AI visibility, catching factual drift in what models say about a brand, and the tools I've been building to automate both.