No forms, no gated PDFs. These are the explanations we would give on a call: what generative engine optimisation is, how assistants pick which businesses to name, and how to check your own in ten minutes.
They are also written the way we tell clients to write: a question as the heading, the answer underneath it, real tables, every figure attributed. A business selling this whose own pages ignore it is not worth listening to.
Read them in order and the whole picture takes about 39 minutes. Or pick the one question you actually have.
Generative engine optimisation is the work of getting a business named in the answers AI assistants write. Where search returns a page of links to choose from, an assistant writes a paragraph and names a handful of businesses in it. GEO is about being one of them.
SEO competes for a position on a page of links. GEO competes to be quoted inside a written answer. They share the groundwork -- a readable, well-structured site -- and diverge on what is measured, which sources matter, and what counts as winning.
It searches, reads a handful of pages, and writes an answer from what those pages say. So the question is not 'how do I rank' but 'which pages does it read, and is my business on them'. Usually those pages are directories, reviews and round-ups rather than your own site.
Four worth knowing: ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. They read different sources and name different businesses, which is why a result from one says little about the others.
Because the answer is generated, not looked up. Ask the same question four times and you often get four overlapping but different lists. That variation is not a bug to be explained away -- it is the reason a single answer tells you almost nothing.
Open ChatGPT, ask the questions your customers would ask, and write down who gets named. Do it several times, because the list changes. Ten minutes gets you an honest picture of whether this is a problem worth spending money on.
Four realistic options: do it yourself, buy a monitoring tool, ask your existing SEO agency, or hire someone who does this specifically. They differ mainly in who does the work and whether anybody measures whether it helped.
The words that come up when people talk about AI visibility, without the jargon. If a provider uses a term that is not here and cannot explain it in a sentence, that is worth noticing.
Last checked September 2026. Where a figure comes from one study we say so, because one study is one study; where something rests on practice rather than published work, we say that instead.
We read your site, work out what you actually sell, then ask 3 buyer questions 4 times each and show you the result: how often you are named, who is named instead, and where the gap is.
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