What is GEO? How to get your business cited in AI answers
More of your customers skip the blue links entirely now. Instead of Googling “best plumber near me” and scanning ten results, they ask ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, or Gemini, and get back a short answer that names two or three businesses. If yours isn’t in there, you were never in the running. Getting into those answers is what GEO is for.
What is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: the work of getting your business cited and recommended inside AI-generated answers. It plays the role for AI assistants that SEO plays for Google. The difference is the target. SEO wants a ranked position in a list. GEO wants the AI to say your name, ideally with a link back to you.
Why GEO matters now
Google AI Overviews now sit above the regular results for a big share of searches, and ChatGPT and Perplexity have hundreds of millions of people asking them for recommendations. AI answers also name a handful of businesses rather than ten, so there’s no page two. Almost ranked gets you nothing.
The other reason: most local businesses haven’t touched this yet. The ones that move first get established as the trusted answer while everyone else is still deciding whether AI search is real.
How to get your business cited in AI answers
The fundamentals overlap with good SEO, but the emphasis shifts. What I do in practice:
Publish content an engine can quote. AI systems extract specific claims, so state what you do, where, and for whom in plain language. FAQs get pulled into answers constantly.
Keep your entity signals consistent. Same name, category, and location on your website, your Google Business Profile, and your directory listings, so the engines resolve all of it to one business.
Add structured data. Schema.org markup and a clean llms.txt file describe you
in a format machines can parse without guessing.
Earn real authority. Mentions, reviews, and links from sources the engines already trust make them more willing to repeat your name.
And stay technically readable. A fast, crawlable site with clean HTML is the prerequisite for any of the above to matter.
GEO and SEO work together
GEO builds on SEO rather than replacing it. The content, structure, and authority that earn Google rankings are the same raw material AI engines read to form their answers, so I run them as one program: AI Search & GEO alongside SEO for Northern Colorado businesses.
What I won’t promise you
A guaranteed spot in an AI answer. The models change weekly and no agency controls them, so anyone selling a guaranteed ChatGPT mention is bluffing. What you can do is stack every signal in your favor and measure where you show up over time. That moves the odds, and it’s the only thing that does.
Want to know what the engines say when someone asks about your category today? Book a free consult call and I’ll pull the answers and walk you through them.
