What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and Why It Matters Now

For twenty years, "getting found online" has meant one thing: ranking well on Google. That’s no longer the whole picture. A growing number of people now ask an AI assistant directly — "what’s a good plumber near me" or "best cafe in my suburb" — and get a short, direct answer instead of a page of links.

What GEO actually is

Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring your business’s online content so AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews can find it, understand it, and confidently name your business in their answer. It’s a different discipline from traditional SEO, even though the two overlap.

How it’s different from SEO

Traditional SEO optimises for a ranking position in a list of links a person then has to click through and evaluate themselves. GEO optimises for being the specific business an AI assistant names directly in its answer — which means the content needs to be structured as clear, confident, factual statements an AI model can extract and repeat, not just keyword-rich prose aimed at a search algorithm.

Why this matters now, not later

AI assistants are becoming a genuine referral channel for local businesses, and most small business websites have never been built with this in mind. The businesses that get structured for it early have a real head start — much like the businesses that took local SEO seriously in its early years.

See where you stand today

Our free AI Search Visibility Checker asks Claude, a leading AI assistant, a real recommendation question for your industry and suburb, and tells you honestly whether your business gets named. It won’t guess or flatter you — if the AI doesn’t know your business yet, the tool will tell you that plainly, which is exactly the starting point for fixing it.