Have you noticed how often an AI-generated summary now appears at the top of your search results? These overviews usually include a small number of sources, so it presents a new opportunity for your website to be discovered. GEO – Generative Engine Optimisation – or AI Search Optimisation, as it’s sometimes called, improves your chances of being featured in this spot.
For years, the goal for small businesses was simple: get onto page one of Google, but if you’re still only thinking about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you might be missing the AI picture.
If you haven’t heard of GEO, don’t worry – most people haven’t. But if you want your business to be the one AI systems recommend, you need to know how they work.
Is GEO just SEO with a fancy new name?
To some extent, yes. If you have a solid SEO foundation, you’re halfway there. But GEO requires some extra bits that traditional SEO often overlooks…
1. Cite-ability
While traditional SEO focuses on winning the click, GEO is about winning the source.
Consider how trustworthy and citeable a Large Language Model (LLM) – like Gemini, ChatGPT, or Perplexity – finds your content. If AI considers your site to be a primary source of truth, it will incorporate your information into its answer and reference it. Use unique data or statistics that an AI can easily reference and add links to your sources.
Citeability is so important because in 2026, many users never even leave the AI tool they’re interacting with – what we call “zero-click visibility”. While this means we face overall clicks dropping, referral traffic you get from AI citations is likely to be high-intent. That means that they’re actively looking for a specific product or service and they have a strong likelihood of converting.
2. Expert quotes
AI engines love authoritative voices. Adding your unique perspective matters more than ever.
When you include a direct quote from a recognised expert, you are essentially providing the AI with a “pre-validated” block of information. Research from Princeton University and Georgia Tech (the originators of the term GEO) indicates that GEO including the strategic addition of expert quotes can improve visibility in AI responses by up to 40%.
Placing quotes directly after a direct answer or a statistic within the same section verifies the claim, which is what the AI is searching for.
For risk mitigation and to avoid generic “AI slop”, AI engines are placing higher weight on opinions that only come from a human specialist, so provide thought leadership content based on your own experiences. Make them two or three sentences long and ensure they can stand alone.
Consider the technical elements of quoting by using author bios and person schema. By adding schema (which is just a bit of invisible code), you are providing a signal of “proven expertise” – a human is behind the content.
3. Direct answers
Structure your content to answer the specific questions your customers are asking.
To understand why direct answers work in GEO, it’s useful to understand how AI engines like Gemini or Perplexity process your page through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG):
- Retrieval: The AI engine searches the web and pulls 10–20 relevant chunks of text.
- Synthesis: The LLM “reads” these chunks to find the clearest, most concise answer.
- Citation: The engine selects the sources that provided the most accurate facts and reliable evidence.
By giving a direct answer and well-organised answer, you make it easier for the AI to find and trust your information. When your content is easy for the system to understand, the AI is significantly more likely to use your content as the basis of its response and link back to you as the source.
AI engines favour content structured as FAQs. To capitalise on this, use answer-first formatting: place a direct, one-sentence response immediately beneath your heading (H2 or H3), and wrap it in FAQ schema to ensure engines can instantly identify and extract your answer. By adding the schema here, you’re telling AI that this specific bit of text is a question, and this bit right here is the answer.
The new search reality
The shift from SEO to GEO is the most significant change in digital marketing for a decade. Success no longer depends on keywords and clicks, but on how useful and verifiable your information is to a generative engine.
SEO essentials for the AI era
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