A prospect asks ChatGPT to recommend a company that does what you do. The assistant answers with three names and a short explanation of each.
You are either on that list or you are not. There is no page two.
That is the problem GEO exists to solve.
What GEO actually is
GEO stands for generative engine optimization. It is the work of getting your business found, cited, and recommended by AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini.
SEO earns you a position in a list of links. GEO earns you a mention inside an answer.
The two overlap more than most people expect. But they are not the same job, and the differences change how you should build and write your website.
How AI assistants choose what to recommend
There are two layers to it.
The first layer is what the model already knows. AI models are trained on a huge snapshot of the public web. If your business shows up consistently across that snapshot, the model has a stable idea of who you are, what you do, and who you serve. If your presence is thin or contradictory, the model has a blurry idea, or none at all.
The second layer is what the assistant retrieves at answer time. Most assistants now run live web searches, read a handful of pages, and synthesize an answer from them. They cite a few sources. Usually a small few.
So your visibility depends on two things. Does the model know you exist? And when the assistant goes looking, is your site one of the pages worth reading and quoting?
Pages that win retrieval tend to share traits:
- They answer the question directly, near the top, in plain language.
- They are structured so a machine can parse them. Clear headings, short sections, lists, tables.
- They state specific facts an assistant can lift and cite.
- The facts about the business match what the rest of the web says.
How GEO differs from SEO
The habits are related, but the scoreboard is different.
Links versus answers. SEO competes for ten blue links. GEO competes for a spot inside one synthesized answer that might name two to five sources. The margin for error is smaller.
Clicks versus citations. In SEO, you win when someone clicks. In GEO, you can win without a click at all. The assistant recommends you by name, and the prospect arrives already pointed at you.
Keywords versus entities. SEO historically optimized for keyword phrases. GEO cares more about entities. An entity is a distinct thing a machine can recognize: a business, a person, a product, a place. Assistants reason about entities and the relationships between them. Your job is to make your business an unambiguous entity with consistent facts attached.
Position versus quotability. Ranking third is a fine SEO outcome. In GEO, the question is whether your page contains a sentence clean enough to quote. Vague copy gives an assistant nothing to work with.
What to change on your site
Five practical moves, roughly in order of effort.
1. Restructure for answer-first reading
Lead with the answer, then explain. Use headings that match real questions. Keep one idea per section. Prefer lists and tables over long paragraphs when the content is a set of steps, options, or comparisons.
This helps humans too. That is not a coincidence. Assistants learned to read from us.
2. Add schema markup
Schema is code added to your pages that labels facts in a standardized format machines read reliably. It tells a crawler "this is the business name, this is the address, this is the service, this is a question and its answer" instead of leaving it to guess.
Start with Organization, LocalBusiness if you have locations, Service pages, and FAQ markup on pages that answer real questions. Wire it once, correctly, sitewide.
3. Clean up your entity
Pick one canonical description of what your business does, for whom, and where. Use it everywhere. Your About page, your LinkedIn, your Google Business Profile, your directory listings.
Contradictions confuse machines. A business that describes itself five different ways across the web reads as five blurry half-entities instead of one sharp one.
4. Publish citable content
Assistants quote sources that say specific things plainly. Definitions. Numbered steps. Clear comparisons. Concrete recommendations with reasoning attached.
"We deliver world-class results" is not citable. "Here are the four account structures that work for Google Ads under a constrained budget, and when to use each" is.
Write the pages only you can write. Original explanations built from real work beat generic overviews every time.
5. Add an llms.txt file
llms.txt is an emerging convention, similar in spirit to robots.txt. It is a plain text file at the root of your site that gives AI systems a curated map: your most important pages, each with a short description.
Adoption across AI companies is still uneven, and no assistant has promised to honor it. But it costs almost nothing to add, and it forces a useful exercise: deciding which pages actually define your business.
What stays the same
GEO is not a replacement for SEO. It is built on top of it.
Everything that made a site healthy before still matters. A crawlable, fast site. Real expertise in the content. Internal links that connect related pages. Other credible sites referencing yours. Titles and descriptions that say what the page is.
Assistants retrieve from search indexes. If search engines cannot find and trust your site, assistants will not either. A broken SEO foundation makes GEO work pointless, so fix the foundation first.
We cover how we build that foundation on our websites and search page, and the reporting layer that tracks it on analytics and reporting.
How to find out where you stand
Run the test yourself. Ask ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity the questions your prospects would ask. Best options in your category, in your region, for your kind of customer. Note who gets named, who gets cited, and whether the facts about your business come back accurate.
Then look at your site the way a machine would. Is the structure parseable? Is the schema present and correct? Does every page state its point in the first two sentences?
If you want that done rigorously, our AI discoverability audit checks how assistants currently describe your business, what they cite instead of you, and exactly what to change. It pairs well with a website audit when the foundation needs work too.
Where to start
GEO rewards businesses that state clearly what they do and prove it in public. That is not a trick. It is a discipline, and it compounds.
If you are not sure whether the problem is your site, your search foundation, or the layer underneath, the Performance Audit sorts it out. We look at how your marketing actually runs, weight the findings by dollar impact, and hand you a plan you keep either way.