Generative Engine Optimisation

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of getting your business named and cited when ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews answer a question you should own. Not ranked on a results page — actually written into the answer. Same goal search has always had, different machinery underneath.

You're probably here for one of two reasons. Either your MD asked "why doesn't ChatGPT mention us?" and you need a proper answer, or you've seen the acronym soup and suspect the whole category is repackaged snake oil. Both fair. This page explains what the work actually is — and what it isn't.

What is generative engine optimisation?

When someone asks an AI assistant for the best supplier in your category, the model doesn't serve ten links. It retrieves a handful of sources it trusts, synthesises them into one answer, and names the businesses those sources agree on. Generative engine optimisation is how you become one of those businesses: described the same way everywhere, vouched for by people who aren't you, and easy for a model to find and quote without embarrassing itself.

There's no backdoor. Nobody can inject your brand into a model, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling you a haunted amulet. What you can do is stack the inputs: make your site unambiguous about who you are, publish content that answers real buyer questions directly, and earn enough independent coverage that citing you is the low-risk choice. The rest is diligence and repetition.

Models don't take your word for who you are. They take everyone else's.

GEO, AEO and AI search optimisation: different names for the same job

The industry couldn't agree on a name, so it minted four. GEO. AEO — answer engine optimisation. AIO. LLMO. They all describe the same job: making your business visible in AI-generated answers. Answer engine optimisation leans on the "answer" framing, AI search optimisation on the "search" one, but the audit is the same, the levers are the same and the deliverables are the same.

Why should you care? Because some agencies sell these as separate services with separate retainers, which is a pricing strategy dressed up as a service catalogue. We say generative engine optimisation because it's the term most people search — not because it's a distinct discipline that deserves its own line on your invoice.

How do you actually get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity?

Three levers, none of them secret. Every credible GEO engagement is some weighting of these.

/Make your entity unmistakable

Models hedge when they're unsure what you are. If your site describes you five different ways, your directory listings disagree and your schema markup is missing, you're a risky citation. We tighten the story: one clear description of what you do and who it's for, structured data that repeats it in machine-readable form, and consistency everywhere your name appears.

/Publish answer-shaped content

Retrieval systems hunt for passages that answer the question outright. Pages that bury the answer under four hundred words of preamble don't get lifted. We restructure your key pages so the direct answer comes first, headings match the questions buyers actually ask assistants, and every claim is specific enough to quote.

/Earn third-party corroboration

The heaviest lever, and the one you can't fake. Models weight independent sources — trade press, industry publications, credible directories — far more than anything you say about yourself. Coverage and citations earned through digital PR are what turn "this company says it's good" into "multiple sources agree". If a GEO pitch doesn't mention earned media, it's missing the engine.

What's inside our generative engine optimisation service

Every deliverable is named before you sign. Here's what a discoweb GEO engagement actually contains:

• Entity audit — how ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity currently describe you and your competitors, and where you're absent or wrong
• Citation-source mapping — the publications, directories and pages models actually pull from in your category
• Schema and structured data implementation across your key pages
• Answer-shaped rewrites of the pages that should win your highest-value questions
• Digital PR briefs targeting the sources models cite, so new coverage does double duty
• Quarterly prompt re-testing, so you see the needle move — or hear us explain why it hasn't yet

That's the service. If a deliverable isn't on the list, you're not paying for it.

How do you measure AI search visibility?

By asking the machines. You run the questions your buyers ask — hundreds of them, phrased the way real people phrase things — against ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and AI Overviews, then track who gets mentioned, who gets cited and how you're described. Ask a model the same question twice and you'll get two different answers, so one prompt proves nothing — repeat the test, count the mentions, and you've got the only honest measure.

Measurement is a discipline in its own right, so it gets its own page. See AI visibility tracking for how we baseline your presence, benchmark it against competitors and report without vanity metrics.

Does GEO replace SEO? No. It stands on it.

Every AI assistant that cites sources leans on search indexes and crawlers to find them. If your site is slow, unindexed or thin, no amount of GEO wizardry saves you — the model can't cite what retrieval never surfaces. GEO is a layer on top of solid SEO, not a replacement for it, and it inherits every foundation SEO lays: crawlability, site structure, content quality, authority.

That's why GEO sits alongside technical SEO, content and links in our full list of services rather than off in a shiny silo. These channels feed each other, or they starve together.

Why hire discoweb as your generative engine optimisation agency?

Because we'll tell you the boring truth: GEO is earned, compounding work — and that's the pitch. You get named deliverables, plain-English reporting, and a UK team built for B2B firms that need commercial results, not thought leadership about the singularity.

If you want the whole engagement — SEO foundations, GEO and visibility tracking under one retainer — that's our AI SEO agency service. If you want GEO done properly on top of SEO you've already got covered, you're on the right page.