A growing share of buyers are starting their research not in Google, but in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's own AI Overviews. For brands that appear in those answers, the traffic quality is high and the intent is strong. For brands that do not appear, that search journey is invisible to them.
This is what Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is about. It is not a replacement for traditional SEO. It is an additional layer of visibility that is becoming increasingly important.
Generative AI tools pull from a relatively small pool of sources. They favour content that is:
The pattern we see across clients who appear in AI answers is consistent: they have deep, specific content on a topic, they are cited in third-party publications, and their content is structured clearly enough that a language model can extract and attribute the key point without distortion.
AI tools do not cite brand storytelling. They cite data, frameworks, and specific claims. If your content contains original research, a named methodology, a specific statistic, or a clear process with a name attached to it, you become citable. Generic "10 tips" articles do not get cited. A post that says "we analysed 400 Shopify stores and found that 62% had uncanonicalized tag pages" does.
The single best thing you can do for GEO is create a piece of content with a specific, original finding that other people in your industry would want to reference.
AI tools learn what is authoritative partly by observing what other authoritative sources link to and cite. A finding that appears on your site alone is much weaker than one that appears on your site and is referenced in an industry publication, a Reddit thread, a podcast show notes page, and a LinkedIn post from a well-connected person in your space.
This is why digital PR and content distribution matter for GEO. The goal is not just traffic from the publication. It is the signal that your content is worth referencing.
Use clear headings that state the point directly. Use short paragraphs. Where you have a list or a process, mark it up as a list or numbered steps rather than burying it in prose. AI tools are better at extracting structured information than parsing dense paragraphs.
Your brand should have a consistent description across your website, your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn, and any third-party listing. When the information about what your company does, who it serves, and where it operates is consistent across sources, AI tools can confidently attribute things to you.
Traditional search analytics will not capture AI-referred traffic well. Look at direct traffic trends, branded search volume over time, and if you have the budget, run periodic prompts in ChatGPT and Perplexity for the questions your ideal customer would ask, and note whether your brand appears.
We run this manually for clients on a monthly basis as part of our GEO reporting. It is not a perfect measurement but it is the closest thing available right now.
We work on GEO alongside traditional SEO for clients across SaaS, eCommerce, and B2B.
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