What is GEO (generative engine optimisation) and should you outsource it?

In short: what GEO is

GEO is a set of actions that make AI assistants mention your brand more often, describe it correctly and link to your website. The term appeared in 2023 in the research paper “GEO: Generative Engine Optimization” by researchers from Princeton University and other institutions. It has synonyms: AEO (answer engine optimisation) and LLMO (large language model optimisation). The difference between them is mostly marketing.

The goal of GEO isn’t “first place” but being present in the answer. When someone asks ChatGPT “where to have breakfast in central Edinburgh” or “which CRM to choose for a beauty salon”, the assistant names a few options. GEO answers the question: are you among them, what does it say about you, and which websites does the answer rely on.

How GEO relates to SEO

GEO doesn’t replace SEO — it builds on it. In its guide to optimising for generative AI features in Search, Google explicitly calls this work SEO and advises sticking with the fundamentals: indexing, helpful content, user-friendly pages. There are no separate requirements for AI Overviews and AI Mode: a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet.

What GEO adds on top of SEO:

• A different unit of measurement. Not a page’s ranking, but the share of answers in which your brand is mentioned or recommended.
• A wider range of sources. AI often takes information not from your website but from round-ups, media, maps and reviews. More on this in how optimising for AI differs from SEO.
• Fact control. AI can get your address, prices or opening hours wrong. That’s a separate task that hardly exists in traditional SEO.

What GEO work involves

1. A list of queries. 10–50 questions your customers actually ask, in their language and with their city in mind.
2. A baseline measurement. How often your brand is mentioned, which competitors appear instead of you, which websites are cited.
3. Source analysis. Which pages the answers rely on: your website, media, directories, maps. See which sources AI relies on.
4. Fixing errors. Inaccurate facts about your brand in the answers and in the sources AI takes them from.
5. Technical readiness of your website. Access for AI search crawlers (for example, OpenAI says sites that block OAI-SearchBot won’t be shown in ChatGPT search answers), a correct robots.txt, clear pages with facts.
6. Content and presence beyond your website. Missing pages (comparisons, prices, FAQ), getting into relevant round-ups and media, reviews.
7. Regular re-measurement. Without it, you can’t tell whether anything has changed.

In-house or outsourced: an honest comparison

In-house makes sense if you have a marketer or SEO specialist and a small number of queries. They need a tool that puts questions to AI assistants every day and shows the answers. For an overview of such tools, see AI visibility tools.

Outsourcing is worth it when there’s nobody to do the work, when you need presence in media and directories (long, manual work), or when AI is spreading errors about your brand and they need fixing quickly.

There’s also a middle option: a service measures the answers every day, and a team implements changes only where you can’t keep up. That’s how AI Visibility works: the platform checks ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode every day and builds an action plan with evidence, and the IWIS team can implement it for a separate fee.

What to ask an agency before you sign up

• How will you measure results? A good answer: specific queries, specific platforms, how often they’re checked and which metrics (share of voice, mention rate, recommendation rate).
• Can I see the actual AI answers, not just the numbers? A number without the answer it came from proves very little.
• Which platforms do you check, and how? ChatGPT answers differently via the API and in the browser; Google AI Overviews doesn’t appear for every query.
• What exactly will you do each month? A list of tasks, not “we’ll improve your visibility”.
• What do you promise? If an agency guarantees that AI will recommend you, that’s a red flag. The answer is produced by the model, and nobody fully controls it.

Where to get generative engine optimisation for your business

There are three options. GEO agencies specialise in exactly this and usually have their own monitoring tools. SEO and marketing agencies add GEO to their SEO services, which is convenient if you already work with them. Monitoring services with an implementation team give you daily data and help where you need it. Whichever you choose, start with a baseline measurement: without it, you won’t be able to judge the contractor’s work. How such an audit is carried out is described in auditing your brand’s recommendations in chatbots.

How to check this for your business

Start with a single query: enter your brand name and a customer question in the free live check, and in 20–60 seconds you’ll see a real ChatGPT answer. To see the picture over several days across all four platforms, use the free first week. Prices for ongoing work are on the pricing page.