What is GEO (generative engine optimisation)? Explained for business owners

Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, means improving how your business is found, understood and represented in AI answers.

It matters because the audience is already there: almost half of Australian adults have used generative AI. Google says AI Mode passed one billion monthly users in May 2026. You should know what an assistant may already be telling your customers about you.

What is GEO, and how does it differ from SEO?

GEO is a label for part of the search job, not a replacement for it. SEO is the broad discipline of being found through search. It's about pages that search engines can access, understand and rank. GEO overlaps heavily with SEO, because the same crawlable, accurate, useful pages feed both.

Answer engine optimisation, or AEO, puts the emphasis on direct answer formats. That's the kind of answer a snippet, a voice assistant or an AI Overview can lift.

GEO puts the emphasis on generated answers across assistants. The question there is whether your facts and evidence are present, consistent and worth citing. SEO, AEO and GEO are overlapping industry labels, not three official platform products.

You will also see "AI SEO" and the US spelling "generative engine optimization". They describe the same work. The term comes from a research paper by Pranjal Aggarwal and colleagues, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. It was published in the ACM KDD conference proceedings in August 2024.

The authors tested ways to change source content. In their own benchmark, those changes lifted visibility in generated answers by up to 40%. The effect varied by subject area.

Treat that as a controlled research test on the systems of the time. It isn't a measurement of ChatGPT, Perplexity or AI Overviews today. And never read it as a promised result.

Do not read the rows as fences. Links still help GEO, direct answers still help SEO, and accurate entity facts help all three.

Is GEO just SEO with a new name? The honest answer to give anyone selling you a reinvention: most of the foundations are shared. Our guide to SEO for small businesses covers those foundations. The differences are where the answers appear and how visibility is measured. That's why the measurement method below looks nothing like a rank tracker.

None of this means SEO is dead. GEO is one part of a bigger argument: how AI search changes visibility for a whole business.

What does visibility in AI answers actually mean?

Five different things can happen to a business inside an AI answer. Lazy reporting treats them as one. Use these labels in every log and every report.

After those five come the outcomes that pay: an enquiry and a sale. A flat citation on the page that produces quotes beats a glowing mention that sends nobody. The mistake to avoid is counting a mention as a recommendation. That's because an assistant can name you while telling the person to call someone else.

Read that answer as a log would. Harbour Books, standing in for your business, gets a mention and an owned citation. The recommendation goes to a competitor, carried by a directory page. And nothing is a referral until someone clicks.

How do AI systems find and use business information?

Some answers come from a live web search and some do not. That single fact explains most of the confusion about GEO.

An assistant may answer from what its model already holds. It may also run one or more searches or fetch a specific page a user asks about. Or it may combine all three in one reply.

That flow is a simplified example of web retrieval, not a map of any single documented algorithm. Some answers skip the search step altogether.

The sources sit in four places:

• your owned pages

• the search indexes those systems query

• business profiles and product feeds

• independent sources that discuss you, from directories to forums

For Google, the search index means Google's index. For Copilot and some ChatGPT search use, it means Bing's. Bing described this in its June 2025 note on AI visibility. No assistant consults every source. Bing is one route rather than the only one.

Google's page on AI features and your website describes how a query fans out. One question becomes several related searches across subtopics while the answer is generated. Our guide to getting cited in Google AI search works through what that means for a page.

That guide also covers the Google extras. Those include Merchant Center and Business Profile data, plus the ads that can now appear inside AI Overviews. The ads are paid placements rather than GEO.

OpenAI's own description of searching the web with ChatGPT makes four points:

• ChatGPT may rewrite a question into one or more targeted queries

• it sometimes partners with other search providers

• it may use an approximate location for local results

• its results and citations can be incomplete, outdated or incorrect

Anthropic and Perplexity run their own search indexing agents too, listed in the crawler table further down.

The practical lesson is that an answer is not simply a reading of your website. The answer is assembled from whatever the model already holds and whatever its search partner returns. It also draws on whatever third parties have said about you. Each of those is something you can check.

What should you improve on your website and beyond?

Four things, in order: accurate business facts, clear answers, verifiable claims and corroboration from sources you don't control. Access comes first, covered in the crawler section below.

Accurate business facts

Start with a single record of what is true about the business. Inconsistent facts are easy to miss and cheap to fix.

A previous trading name on a directory. A service you no longer offer on an old PDF. A phone number that differs between your site and your profile. Each gives an assistant a reason to hedge or to pick the wrong fact.

Two meanings of "citation" collide here, so keep them apart. A local citation is a business listing on a directory or association site. It shows your name, address and phone number. Our guide to Australian business citations covers which of those listings still matter. An AI citation is a source link inside a generated answer.

Consistent local citations help the first kind of visibility. They feed the second too, because directories are among the pages assistants cite. A locally served business can check its local SEO readiness in a few minutes. Do that first to catch profile and listing gaps. It's a data check, not a GEO score.

Mark the facts up as well as writing them. Use Organization and LocalBusiness schema markup that matches what visitors can see. That markup helps Google and others connect your name, address and services to one entity. Google's structured data guidelines require markup to represent the visible page. On its own, markup proves nothing.

If you need a starting point, the schema markup generator builds the basic types. Your developer should check them against what the page shows.

Clear answers

Write direct answers to the questions customers ask, in plain language. Put each answer on the page that owns that question. Google's guide to generative AI features on Search says you don't need to write in a special way. Nor do you need to break content into tiny pieces.

A passage that states its subject, gives the answer and keeps its qualification is what gets lifted. The system doing the lifting doesn't change that.

The formats that win featured snippets and People Also Ask answers are covered in our featured snippets guide.

Verifiable claims

Replace adjectives with facts you can prove. "Leading specialists" is a claim with no evidence attached. A registration number anyone can look up is a claim with an audit trail.

That rewrite is an example, written for a fictional bookkeeper. Precise copy still needs the evidence behind it. Keep a claim inventory beside the facts record. That way every public claim an assistant might repeat has an owner and a source.

Our guide to E-E-A-T for small business covers keeping that inventory as a claim register. It also covers how to show real experience without declaring an "E-E-A-T score". That score isn't a thing. Where you have original data worth publishing, see the method and checklist for building topical authority. They explain what a research asset needs before it goes live.

Useful, documented evidence can support an answer. Google's guidance on helpful, reliable content asks whether a page provides "original information, reporting, research, or analysis". No type of asset is guaranteed a citation, though. Anyone ranking asset types for you is guessing.

External corroboration

Answers draw on sources you don't control as well as your own pages. The types worth knowing:

• directories and industry association listings

• review platforms

• media coverage

• comparison and "best of" articles

• forums such as Reddit

• YouTube

Across the prompt runs we log for clients, about 4 in 10 citations pointed to business websites. Those sites were the client's own or a competitor's. Most of the rest pointed to listings and profiles, such as Google Business Profile and industry directories. The chart shows every 100 citations, rounded to the nearest five.

Listings drew almost half of those citations. Treat them with the same care as your own site. Our guide to Google Business Profile optimisation covers keeping your profile accurate.

Treat any mix as a starting point, not a rule. It shifts by platform and by question. So check your own prompt log, explained further down, for the types your answers cite. Say a plumber's answers cite a review platform and a council directory. That plumber has a different job from a software vendor whose answers cite comparison articles.

Google's guide to generative AI features, linked earlier, cuts across a whole category of GEO sales pitches. That makes it worth quoting here: "seeking inauthentic 'mentions' across the web isn't as helpful as it might seem".

Links still support discovery and referrals. Mentions can give an assistant context. No universal weighting between them has been established. So "mentions replace links" is a slogan, not a finding.

If the compliance side is unfamiliar, our website compliance checklist covers the claims rules in broad terms.

Then check what is already out there. Outdated pages, PDFs and listings carry conflicting facts. An assistant may not be able to tell which one is current. Correct each fact at its source, check again a few weeks later, and keep the record.

Distinguish three things when an answer is wrong about you: an error, an outdated detail, and legitimate criticism. The first two get fixed at the source. The third gets a response, not a takedown. Nobody can promise that a correction reaches every assistant. Markup does not prove a claim, either.

Which crawlers and controls matter for GEO?

Three different functions hide behind the word "crawler": search access, training preference and user triggered fetching. Mixing them up is how robots.txt files go wrong. A bot that indexes a site for search is not the bot that collects training data. Neither is the agent that fetches a page because a person asked for it.

Then there are the user fetchers. ChatGPT-User, Perplexity-User and Claude-User retrieve a page because a person asked for it. OpenAI and Perplexity both say robots.txt rules may not apply to those fetches. They are not substitutes for the search crawler settings.

The exact scope lives in each provider's documentation: OpenAI's crawler overview, Perplexity's crawler page and Anthropic's ClaudeBot note. All were checked October 2026 and all are liable to change.

User-agent: OAI-SearchBot
Allow: /
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

That sample shows one possible preference: let ChatGPT search index the site while declining training crawls. It isn't a universal recommendation or a complete robots.txt file. Nor is it an access control for private content. A developer should preserve existing path rules and review the whole file before adapting it.

The technical checks go beyond robots.txt. Confirm the pages you care about are indexed under the canonical URL you want cited. Check Google's robots meta tag and preview controls too. The nosnippet rule keeps a page's text out of snippets, AI Overviews and AI Mode. And data-nosnippet does the same for a marked passage.

Check the content is actually available as text. Google's guide to JavaScript SEO basics says Google renders pages and runs their JavaScript. It also warns that not all bots can run JavaScript. So text that appears only after scripts run can be invisible to some crawlers.

Render important content on the server. To test a page, load it with JavaScript switched off. If the service details vanish, assume some crawlers can't see them either.

Then check the switches outside your site. Cloudflare has asked every new domain whether to allow AI crawlers since July 2025, blocking by default. Security plugins block crawlers too. A business can be blocking OAI-SearchBot without anyone having edited robots.txt.

Your hosting or CDN logs settle the question. They show whether OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and the rest actually reach your pages. They also show whether each bot gets the page or an error. Perplexity publishes its crawler IP ranges too. So a firewall can verify the real bot rather than letting in anything that claims the name.

Access supports eligibility but doesn't guarantee selection. So allow the verified crawlers you want rather than opening the firewall to everything.

Google's own controls sit apart from all of this. The Search generative AI control is in Search Console. It decides whether a site appears in AI Overviews, AI Mode and the generative features in Discover. Google says it is not a ranking or inclusion signal for the rest of Search.

Google-Extended governs training and grounding. Google's list of common crawlers says it does not affect inclusion or ranking in Search. Training permission is never a prerequisite for appearing in Search.

The Google citation guide linked earlier covers the control's scope and timing. Whether to block AI crawlers at all is a separate decision. Our guide to whether SEO is dead covers it.

Finally, llms.txt. It's a proposal by Jeremy Howard for a file that helps agents use a website. The proposal was first published in September 2024 and last modified in August 2026. The file is optional and no substitute for robots.txt. Google's generative AI guide, linked above, says Search doesn't need it: it won't help or hurt your visibility.

If an agency proposal leads with llms.txt, ask what else is in the package.

How do you measure GEO without inventing a ranking?

There is no GEO rank. Any report that shows one is built on a prompt sample it isn't showing you. What you can measure is a repeatable sample of answers and Google's own impression counts. You can also measure what your website and enquiry records show. Keep the three apart.

Build the sample first. Choose commercially relevant questions across six types:

• brand

• category

• problem

• comparison

• local

• evidence

"Which Australian accountants specialise in online retail?" is a category question. "Is it worth paying for a bookkeeper if I use Xero?" is a problem question.

Add a location only when it changes who is suitable. Keep the set small and fixed. Run it under documented conditions each month, on each platform and search mode you care about.

Use a separate record for every run, including runs where no search happened or no citation appeared. Those are results, not failures. Three conditions can each change the answer. Note whether web search was on, whether the conversation was fresh or continued, and any personalisation.

Then record the five outcomes separately, with factual errors and relevant competitors beside them.

When you want a rate, define the denominator before you publish it. For an owned citation rate, count the completed runs that cite your own domain at least once. Then divide by all completed runs in that platform's sample. Count each run once and log technical failures separately. Keep the no search and no citation runs in the total.

Any narrower denominator must be labelled as such, or the number flatters you.

Keep each platform's sample and rate separate. Two platforms can name different businesses for the same question. A blended "AI visibility" figure averages answers that may not agree. Report each platform on its own line.

A useful GEO report has three layers:

The first layer is this guide's method. The second is Search Console's Generative AI performance report. It counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country, device and date. The report has no clicks or queries. It may not appear at all for a site with too few impressions.

Bing Webmaster Tools added a counterpart in February 2026. Its AI Performance report counts citations in Copilot and Bing's AI summaries.

The third layer is GA4. Open the Traffic acquisition report under Reports, then Acquisition. Find the AI Assistant row in Session default channel group. Add Session source / medium as a secondary dimension to see which assistants sent the visits. Then check their landing pages and key events.

Google's default channel group puts recognised assistant referrers in AI Assistant, with the medium ai-assistant. Those include ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Grok. Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode stay in Organic Search instead. Check the actual source values rather than assuming, because missing referrers land in direct. If key events aren't set up yet, start with our guide to GA4 for small business.

Paid AI visibility tools sample prompts the same way the log does, with more volume and less transparency. No third party tool has access to Google's internal ranking or AI systems. Google's own generative AI guide states that plainly. Before paying for a score, ask the vendor which prompts, locations, repeats and platforms sit behind it. If they cannot answer, the score is decoration.

The limits are the point. A prompt sample is a sample, not a market wide rank. An answer with no search or no citation is not automatically a test failure. Missing attribution does not prove no influence. Nor does branded search growth alone prove GEO caused it.

Never connect one manual prompt result to one enquiry without a traceable record that says so.

What should you do in the first 90 days?

Baseline, facts and access first, pages and evidence second, then repeat the checks and decide. This is a work plan, not a promise of results inside 90 days.

The cycle describes the business's work, not how an AI model ranks sources. Run it quarterly once the first 90 days are done.

What we recommend at Elev8d

FAQ

Next steps

Sources

• ↗
  About ads and AI Overviewssupport.google.com

  Google Ads Help on the campaigns and countries where ads can appear inside AI Overviews, Australia included.

Written by Ajay K.Co-founder, Elev8d

Ajay is the co-founder of Elev8d and writes most of what you will read here. Psychology grad turned marketer, which is a fancy way of saying he cares about why people click, not just where things rank. Every guide is written in plain English for Australian businesses, tested on real campaigns before it earns a spot on this site.