Glossary

What is GEO?

GEO, or generative engine optimisation, is making your website easy for AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity and Claude to find, read, understand and quote when they answer people's questions.

In plain English.

More and more buyers ask an AI assistant instead of scrolling through search results. The assistant reads websites, then writes an answer and names its sources. GEO is about being one of those sources, and about the assistant getting your business right when it describes you.

How it differs from SEO. Search engine optimisation aims for a high place in a list of links. GEO aims to be the page an answer is built from. They overlap a lot, because both reward clear, accurate, well-structured content, but GEO adds a few things of its own.

What helps

  • Let the AI crawlers in. Each assistant has its own crawler, named in your robots.txt. Blocking them by accident is common. See AI crawlers and robots.txt.
  • Pages that can be read without running scripts. Many AI crawlers read the page as it's first sent, so key content that only appears after JavaScript runs can be missed.
  • Clear, direct answers. A question as the heading and a plain answer straight after it is easy to quote.
  • Structured data. Marking up products, organisations, FAQs and articles helps machines understand what a page is about.
  • Consistent facts about you. The same name, services and details across your site and elsewhere on the web, so assistants describe you correctly.
  • Complete product information, for stores whose products are being compared and recommended by assistants.

Free tool

How visible is your site to AI?

Check whether ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Perplexity and Claude can find, read and quote your site, with a score out of 100 and what to fix. Free, in seconds.

Related

Related terms and services.