What is generative engine optimisation (GEO)?

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of writing and structuring your content so that AI search tools — Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity — quote it directly and name you as the source. For a small business it is not a separate discipline you need to go and learn: it overlaps roughly 80% with ordinary good SEO, with the remaining 20% being answer-first writing and clear structure. If you have done the SEO work, you are most of the way there already.

What generative engine optimisation actually is

When someone asks an AI tool a question, the tool does not show 10 blue links. It writes a short answer in its own words and, increasingly, footnotes the few pages it pulled that answer from. GEO is the work of being one of those footnoted pages — and, ideally, being the page whose exact sentence the model decided to reuse.

That is the whole game, and it is worth being plain about it because the term attracts a lot of noise. GEO is not a secret set of tricks that game a language model. It is the same thing search engines have always rewarded — a clear, correct, well-structured answer to a real question — measured by a slightly different yardstick. The yardstick changed; the underlying work mostly did not.

The reason it gets its own acronym is that the unit of success changed. In classic search, the unit is a ranking position: you want to be result number 1. In generative search, the unit is a passage: you want a specific paragraph or list that a model can lift cleanly and attribute to you. A page can rank well and still never get quoted, because its good information is buried in three paragraphs of wind-up. GEO is largely about not burying the answer.

How it overlaps with (and differs from) SEO

The honest split, for a small business, is about 80/20.

The 80% that is shared: the technical and editorial groundwork is identical. Your pages need to be crawlable, fast enough, on a real topic people search for, and genuinely useful. AI tools find pages the same way search engines do — through the open web and, in Google's case, the same index. Google has been explicit that there is no separate "AI SEO" — the same fundamentals that earn ordinary search visibility are what surface your content in AI features (Google Search Central — AI features and your website). If your site is invisible to Google, it is invisible to the AI layer sitting on top of Google. The starting point is the same one we lay out in our small business SEO checklist.

The 20% that is different is editorial, not technical:

• Lead with the answer. Classic SEO tolerates — sometimes rewards — a slow build. Generative search wants the answer in the first sentence or two, with the supporting detail after it. The pattern matters because it understands what search intent is: a model scanning your page for a quotable answer should find it immediately, not after a scene-setting introduction.
• Make passages liftable. A clean, self-contained paragraph or a tight bulleted list is easier for a model to quote than a sprawling section where the point is spread across five sentences. Each chunk should make sense on its own, pulled out of context.
• State facts as facts. Specific, checkable claims — numbers, dates, named things — get quoted. Vague hedging does not. This is the one place GEO genuinely pushes you to write differently from a typical marketing page.

None of that requires new tooling. It requires editing.

What actually helps you get cited

Here is the practitioner list, in the order that pays off. We write this way ourselves — these pages are built to be quoted.

Answer the question directly, near the top. The single most valuable move. Put a one or two sentence answer to the page's main question in the opening, then expand. If a model has to dig, a competitor who didn't make it dig gets quoted instead.

Use clear structure and honest headings. Descriptive H2s and H3s that match the questions people actually ask. Short paragraphs. Lists where a list is the natural shape. This helps the model segment your page into liftable passages — and helps human readers, which has always been the point.

Be a primary source. This is the durable advantage. A model quoting "the median Australian small business" wants the page that produced that figure, not the tenth page repeating it. First-hand data, original testing, a number only you can report — that is what gets named as a source rather than paraphrased and forgotten. Most pages on any topic are restating someone else's work; the source page wins the citation.

Add structured data where it fits. Schema markup (FAQ, Article, HowTo) does not magically make you quotable, but it removes ambiguity about what your page is and what each part means. It is plumbing, not a growth hack — worth doing once, not worth obsessing over.

Keep your facts consistent across the web. If your business name, claims and key facts say one thing on your site and another on your Google profile, a directory listing and an old PDF, you give the model conflicting signals and it trusts you less. Consistency is a citability factor, not just a tidiness one.

If your pages already do the first three, you are doing GEO, whether or not you call it that. To see where you currently stand, run your own SEO health check — the same crawlability, structure and content signals that report scores are the ones the AI layer reads.

Common variations

The three tools that matter behave differently, and it is worth being honest about how little control you have over each.

Google AI Overviews sit on top of ordinary Google Search and draw from the same index. This is the one a small business can most directly influence: rank well in Google, write answer-first, and you are in the pool Overviews draw from. There is no separate submission process — if you are not ranking organically, fixing that is the prerequisite, and our guide to why isn't my website ranking is the place to start. Knowing what Google Search Console is helps here too: it is the free tool that shows which queries already surface your pages, so you can see which answers Google trusts you on before you try to win the AI layer on top of them.

ChatGPT answers from a mix of its training data and live web search, depending on the question and the user's settings. When it searches, it favours pages that clearly and directly answer the query — the same answer-first writing helps. When it answers from training data, you have essentially no lever beyond being well-known enough, across enough of the web, to have been learned in the first place. Be wary of anyone selling certainty here.

Perplexity is the most search-like of the three: it almost always cites its sources inline, and it rewards pages that answer the question cleanly and load without obstruction. If you are going to be quoted anywhere, it tends to show up first here, which makes it a useful place to check whether your GEO work is landing.

Across all three, the levers you actually control are the same: be findable, be clear, be the source. The differences between platforms are smaller than the marketing around them suggests.

The honest limits

GEO is real, but it is oversold, and a practitioner should say so.

You cannot make an AI tool quote you. You can only make your page the easiest, clearest, most trustworthy thing to quote — and then it is the model's call. There is no submission form, no setting, no certification. Anyone promising guaranteed AI citations is selling something that does not exist.

It is also not a separate budget line for most small businesses. If you have a thin, slow, or invisible website, "doing GEO" is the wrong framing — you need the SEO basics first, because there is nothing for an AI tool to find. GEO is what good SEO turns into when you also write answer-first and structure clearly; it is a finishing layer, not a foundation.

And it moves. The way these tools select and cite sources is changing month to month, and any tactic pinned to one platform's current behaviour is on borrowed time. The things that do not move — answer the question, structure it clearly, be the primary source — are exactly the things that were good practice before any of these tools existed. Do those, and you are optimised for whatever comes next, which is the only kind of optimisation worth paying for.