GEO is all about increasing the chance a site is selected as a trusted source and quoted inside Ai‑generated outputs
It’s a year since I first came across the term ‘GEO’ (‘Generative Engine Optimization’) and it’s not really taken off yet, but its principles certainly should have done by now.
As users of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude increasingly see cobbled-together answers rather than simple link lists, as marketers we have to reconsider how our content is discovered and presented there. It’s a little different from SEO.
Step one is to ensure our site is crawlable by LLM (large language model) systems. The excellent tool at https://technicalseo.com/tools/robots-txt/ is great for seeing what’s blocked – scroll down to the ‘AI Crawlers’ section of ‘User Agents’.
Once crawled, GEO builds on good old traditional SEO. Pages already ranking in Google, Bing and other search engines are more likely to be picked up for Ai overviews. The difference in answering queries is that LLMs often generate additional searches before presenting answers, so our content needs to perform broadly well in SEO, as well as consistently across sites.
Crafting content for GEO also involves writing in a style that Ai systems can quote. This means using clear, declarative statements, with structured Q&A paragraphs working particularly well.
GEO is all about increasing the chance a site is selected as a trusted source and quoted inside Ai‑generated outputs, so we’ve at least been seen – even if users haven’t clicked through from a search results page. It should be becoming clear why branding across multiple channels is so important.