Generative engine optimisation, explained

What generative engine optimisation is

Generative engine optimisation — GEO, sometimes called answer engine optimisation — is the work of making a business legible and credible to the AI assistants people now ask for recommendations. Not ranking a page at position three. Being the name that comes out of the answer.

Traditional search returns a list and lets the person choose. An assistant does the choosing. Someone types "best commercial property solicitor in Manchester" into ChatGPT and gets three names and a reason for each. Whoever isn't in those three never enters the conversation.

How assistants decide who to name

The four that matter for most service businesses are ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Microsoft Copilot and Claude. None of them publish their selection logic, and anyone who claims to know it exactly is guessing. What is observable is where their answers come from.

• Live retrieval. The assistants can fetch pages at the moment of asking, though not every answer is retrieved rather than recalled, so what your site says today can matter as much as what it said last year.
• Third-party corroboration. A claim on your own website is weak on its own. The same fact repeated on directories, professional bodies, press and review sites is what turns it into something an assistant will repeat.
• Entity clarity. The assistant has to be sure which business you are. A common trading name, an inconsistent address, or two versions of your own name across profiles is enough to lose the mention.
• Plain, answerable content. Pages that state who you serve, where, at what price range and with what qualifications are quotable. Pages of atmosphere are not.
• Crawler permission. If your site blocks the assistant crawlers, or renders only in the browser, you can be excellent and still invisible.

How it differs from SEO

GEO is not a replacement for SEO, and good SEO helps. But the goals part ways. SEO optimises for a click; GEO optimises for a citation you may never get a click from. A person can hear your name, look you up directly and call you, with nothing in your analytics to show for it.

That changes how you measure. Ranking positions tell you almost nothing. What tells you something is asking the assistants the questions your customers actually ask, on a schedule, and recording who gets named.

What a service business can actually do

• Fix the mechanics first. Make sure the assistant crawlers are allowed, pages render server-side, and there is a working sitemap.
• Make your identity unambiguous. One canonical name, one website, one phone number, the same founder name — identical everywhere you appear.
• Answer the real questions in prose. Who you work with, what you charge, where you operate, what you will not take on. Specifics are what get quoted.
• Add structured data that matches the page. It does not create visibility on its own, but it removes doubt about what the page is.
• Earn genuine third-party mentions. Professional registers, local press, industry directories, genuine customer reviews. Not bought placements — they do not hold up.
• Measure repeatedly. One check is an anecdote. The same set of questions every month is evidence.

What doesn't work

Keyword stuffing does not work — assistants summarise meaning, not density. Bought mentions and manufactured reviews do not work, and they carry real reputational risk. Nor does anyone control these systems from the outside, so a guaranteed recommendation is not something that can be sold honestly.

There is no public "AI visibility score" either. The only honest measurement is the answers themselves, captured and compared over time.

How long it takes

Technical fixes can sometimes show up quickly, because assistants are able to fetch pages at the moment of asking — though there's no guaranteed timescale. Anything resting on third-party corroboration is slower, usually months rather than weeks, because it depends on other people publishing and on those pages being re-read.

If you'd rather not do it yourself

Preselected does exactly this work as a managed service for high-value service businesses. Each month we check how the assistants answer the questions your customers ask, improve what can genuinely be influenced, and send you a plain report of what changed. £1,000 a month, cancel whenever. It's a service, not software — more about who runs it.

If you'd rather just ask a question first, message 07307691055.