Your customers are starting to ask ChatGPT the questions they used to type into Google. "Best web design agency in London." "Should I hire an SEO company or do it myself?" "What does a new website cost?" More and more, they read the AI's answer and act on it — without ever clicking a single blue link.
That changes the game. For fifteen years, SEO meant one thing: rank on Google's first page. Now there's a second race running alongside it — getting your business named inside the answer that ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews write. The name for it is GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. Some people call it AEO (Answer Engine Optimization). Same idea.
Here's the part that matters if you're a smaller or newer business: the AI engines don't much care how old your domain is or how many backlinks you've bought. They care whether your content clearly and credibly answers the question. That levels a field Google spent two decades tilting toward big incumbents.
What is GEO, and how is it different from SEO?
SEO gets your page to rank. GEO gets your page quoted.
Ask ChatGPT "who are the best real estate marketing agencies" and it won't show ten links. It writes a paragraph, and maybe names three or four companies. If you're one of them, you just got a recommendation from the most trusted advisor your customer has ever used. If you're not, you're invisible — no matter where you sit on Google.
The mechanics differ too. Google ranks pages. AI engines pull sentences — a specific claim, a statistic, a definition — and stitch them into an answer. So the unit of optimization shifts. You're no longer only tuning a page to rank. You're writing sentences that are easy to lift and safe to quote.
Does GEO actually work, or is it hype?
It's measurable, and there's real research behind it. A team from Princeton and Georgia Tech published the first large study on this (the "GEO: Generative Engine Optimization" paper) and found that adding statistics, citations and quotations to content lifted its visibility in AI answers by up to 115% — and the effect was largest for sites that weren't already ranking at the top.
Read that last part again. The pages that gained the most were the underdogs. That's your opening.
How to get your business cited by AI: 7 things that move the needle
None of this is magic. It's the same instinct as good SEO — be genuinely useful — pointed at a slightly different target.
1. Answer the question in the first two sentences. AI models scan for a clean, self-contained answer. Bury it under 400 words of preamble and they'll skip you for a competitor who led with it. Put the answer up top, then explain.
2. Write in facts, not fluff. "We deliver world-class results" is unquotable. "Our real-estate client hit 71.9K Google impressions and 5,320 clicks in 90 days with zero ad spend" is a sentence an AI can lift and attribute. Specific, checkable claims get cited; vague ones get ignored. (That example is real — here are the numbers.)
3. Use clear question-and-answer headings. Headings like "How much does SEO cost?" or "How long does it take to rank?" match how people actually ask AI. The model finds the heading, reads the answer beneath it, and quotes it. Structure is retrieval.
4. Add an FAQ to your important pages. For most small businesses this is the highest-return move on the list. A tight FAQ is pre-packaged answers, in exactly the format AI wants to lift.
5. Get mentioned on sites the AI already trusts. Models weight sources they see referenced across the web — industry directories, reputable blogs, Reddit threads, review sites. A citation from a source ChatGPT already reads is worth more than ten pages on your own domain. This is the new version of backlinks, and it counts for AI just as it did for Google.
6. Keep your facts consistent everywhere. Your services, location, prices and name — the same on your site, your Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories. When the facts line up across the web, the model trusts them. When they contradict, it hedges and leaves you out.
7. Be the source of the statistic. The fastest way to get quoted is to publish the number everyone else wants to cite. Original data — a survey, a case study, a benchmark from your own work — becomes the sentence AI reaches for. We did exactly that with our real-estate case study, and it's why that page gets referenced.
Do you still need normal SEO?
Yes. Don't let anyone sell you GEO as a replacement — that's the hype talking. Google is still where most buying journeys start, AI Overviews are built on top of Google's index, and the same fundamentals feed both: a fast site, clear content, real authority. GEO isn't a separate channel you bolt on. It's what good SEO becomes when the search results start talking back.
The businesses that win the next few years won't choose one over the other. They'll do the fundamentals well enough that both a human skimming Google and a model writing an answer reach the same conclusion — these people know what they're talking about.
Where to start this week
If you do nothing else: take your five most important pages, and for each, write the answer to the question that page should own — in the first two sentences, in plain language, with one specific, checkable fact. Then add three FAQ questions underneath. That alone puts you ahead of most competitors, who are still writing brochure copy no human, and no AI, wants to quote.
If you'd rather see where you stand first, our free AI audit checks your site the same way, and our AI SEO & GEO service is built entirely around getting you cited by the engines your customers are starting to trust. Or just tell us what you're working on — we'll point you in the right direction.