What is GEO? Generative engine optimisation, explained for UK businesses.

GEO, generative engine optimisation, is the work of getting your business named in the answers AI tools give. When someone asks ChatGPT for the best accountant in Leamington or the right flight case for a race team, GEO is what decides whether your name is in the reply.

It is sometimes called AEO, answer engine optimisation, or AI SEO. The labels differ; the job is the same.

Where AI answers come from

An AI tool answers from two places: what it learned in training, and what it fetches from the web when you ask. Training data is months old, so a new business is rarely in it. The live part is where you can win. ChatGPT search, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews all read pages on the web and build an answer from what they find.

That gives you three conditions. The AI tool has to be able to fetch your page, it has to be able to read what is on it, and what it reads has to answer the question better than the alternatives.

What GEO work actually involves

• Readability: pages that arrive as plain HTML, AI crawlers allowed in robots.txt, and no firewall rule quietly turning them away.
• Facts: prices, terms, locations and results published on the page and in a plain-text llms.txt file, plus structured data that labels them.
• Answers: pages built around the exact questions buyers ask before they choose, each answering in its opening lines.
• Comparisons: pages that put you next to the names the AI already recommends.
• Corroboration: the same facts about you on directories, profiles and lists the AI tools read.
• Measurement: the same set of questions asked again and again, so you can see who gets named and whether it changes.

How it differs from SEO

SEO wins a ranked link on a results page. GEO wins a mention inside an answer the AI writes itself. They share foundations, crawlable pages, fast sites, structured data, but they reward different things. An AI tool prefers a specific number over a confident adjective, and it leans heavily on what other sites say about you. You can rank fifth on Google and be named first by ChatGPT, or rank first and be left out entirely. We cover the differences in GEO vs SEO.

Does it work?

It does when the basics are right. We launched Sable Management, a new agency with no history, and four days later ChatGPT put it first when asked for the best OnlyFans agencies in the UK. VMEP, a motorsport supplier on Shopify, went from about 2% visibility in AI answers to 30% in three months, and ChatGPT now names it for 9 of its 10 main products.

What it costs

Our GEO Launch is £1,999: the readability, facts, answers and comparisons built in 48 hours, then 90 days of tracking and new pages. Before that, you can see your homepage the way ChatGPT does for free with our ChatGPT view.

If an AI tool can't read you, nothing else matters. Start there.