The Next-Gen Brand Lab
Choosing an agency
What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?
Last updated 2026-09-09
GEO is the practice of getting a business cited inside AI-generated answers — ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews — rather than ranked in a list of blue links. The mechanics differ from SEO in one decisive way: an assistant lifts a passage and attributes it, so the unit of optimisation is a self-contained, specific, attributable statement rather than a page. Vague pages rank; quotable ones get cited.
What actually gets cited
Four properties, consistently. Specificity — a number beats an adjective, and a number with a date and a method beats a bare number. Self-containment — the passage has to survive being lifted out of its page. Attributability — a named entity with consistent identity across sources. Original measurement — assistants cite whoever produced the data far more readily than whoever summarised it.
That last one is why publishing your own research matters more in GEO than it ever did in SEO. A restated industry statistic has a hundred sources competing to be cited; a scrape you ran yourself has one.
What actively hurts
Near-duplicate content is the strongest negative signal available. A corpus that repeats the same paragraph with the subject swapped reads to a model exactly as it reads to you, and it degrades the credibility of everything published beside it.
Contradiction is the second. If your own pages disagree about your price, your location or your track record, an assistant has no way to choose between them and will usually cite a third party instead.
Want this answered for your project specifically?
A Phase 0 call is a questionnaire, not a pitch. You get the market read before anyone spends a rupee on advertising.
Book a Phase 0 call ↗