What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?

GEO, generative engine optimisation, is work that helps AI assistants name your business in their answers. When someone asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity or Meta Muse where to buy or who to call, the assistant names two or three businesses. GEO is about being one of them.

Why it matters

More and more people skip the search results and ask an assistant instead. The assistant doesn't show ten links. It writes one answer, and most people pick one of the businesses it names. If it doesn't name you, that customer goes to someone it did name.

How AI assistants decide who to name

An assistant repeats what the internet already says about you. To answer a question it reads pages, often searches the web, and puts together what it finds. So three things decide whether you are in the answer:

01Can it read your site?If your site blocks AI crawlers, the assistant knows less about you than about your competitors.
02Are there facts it can quote?Clear prices, services, specs, locations and answers to real questions. A vague page gives it nothing to repeat.
03Do other sites mention you?Reviews, best-of lists, press, directories, marketplaces, forums. AI trusts what other people say about you more than what you say about yourself.

SEO and GEO side by side

	SEO	GEO
Where you show up	Google's list of links	The answer an AI assistant writes
What you get	A position on the page	A mention or a recommendation
What it depends on	Your site, content, links	Your site, facts AI can quote, what other sites say
How we measure it	Rankings, clicks, traffic	Share of answers that name you

They share the same base. That is why we always do both.

How we do it

1
Open the site to AI crawlers

On the first day we check whether GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Googlebot, Bingbot and other crawlers can open your home page, product or service pages, robots.txt and sitemap. Blocks often come from hosting "bot protection", a server rule or a Cloudflare setting that blocks AI bots. Your developer gets an exact instruction, and we check the fix.
2
Give AI facts it can quote

We add structured data (Organization, Product and Offer, FAQ and others) and write pages that answer one question clearly. Specs go into tables with units. Prices, delivery, returns and locations are stated plainly. A page like this is easy for an assistant to quote and hard to get wrong.
3
Be present where AI looks

We look at which sites the assistants actually cite in your field. Then we work on being there: reviews from real customers, best-of lists, industry press, directories, marketplaces and communities like Reddit. We never buy reviews or links.
4
Measure across assistants

We ask the assistants the questions your customers ask and count how often you are named in answers that don't mention your brand. We also record your competitors' share, your position in the answer and the sites the answer comes from. We check as a real user sees it, from your country, because answers differ by location.

The first measurement is point A. After that we repeat it every two weeks with the same questions and the same method, so the numbers can be compared. AI answers usually start to change after six to ten weeks.

Learn more

Our blog has practical guides on getting found in Google and AI answers for specific types of business. See also our services and how we work.

Want to know what AI says about your business today? Write to hello@showmegeo.com with your website.

Questions

Is GEO different from SEO?

SEO is about your place in Google's list of links. GEO is about the answer an AI assistant writes. They overlap a lot, because the assistants learn from and search the same web that Google ranks. We do both.

Can you guarantee ChatGPT will recommend us?

No. Nobody can promise what an AI will say. We can promise the work, honest checks on the same questions every two weeks, and a clear report on what changed.

Do we need an llms.txt file?

It helps some assistants find your key pages, and it takes little time. It matters much less than whether AI crawlers can read your site at all, and whether other sites mention you.

How do you know which questions to check?

From your keyword map: real searches in your field with their volumes. We turn them into the questions people ask an assistant and check them in proportion to real demand.