What Is GEO and How Should You Be Optimising for AI Search?

The Search Results Page Has Changed. Have You Noticed?

Type almost any informational question into Google right now and the first thing you see is not a list of blue links. It is a generated answer, written by AI, pulling from sources Google has decided to trust. No click required. The answer is just there.

This is Google AI Overviews, and it is not a test or a preview feature. It is the default experience for a growing share of searches. Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot are doing the same thing, answering questions directly using content they have crawled and assessed.

For marketing managers at SMEs, the question this raises is uncomfortable: if someone asks a question relevant to your business and AI answers it without referencing your content, does your website even exist in that moment?

This is where a discipline called Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, comes in. It is an emerging area of SEO that is quickly becoming essential for any brand that relies on organic visibility.

What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)?

Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of structuring and presenting your content in a way that makes it more likely to be cited, referenced, or surfaced by AI-generated responses.

Traditional SEO focuses on ranking your pages in the standard search results. GEO is about something different: getting your content selected as a source when AI systems compose their answers.

Think of it this way. In traditional SEO, you are competing for position one in the rankings. In GEO, you are competing to be the source that AI points to when it answers a question on your behalf. That is a fundamentally different objective, and it requires a different approach.

GEO builds on the foundations of good on-page SEO but goes further. It is about demonstrating real expertise, structured clarity, and the kind of authority that AI models can assess and trust.

Why This Matters for SMEs Right Now

Google AI Overviews now appear for a significant proportion of search queries in the UK, and that number is growing month by month. For informational and research-led searches, which tend to sit at the top of the buying funnel, AI answers are often the first and only result a user reads.

For SMEs, this creates two risks. First, if your brand is not being cited by AI, you lose visibility at the very moment a potential customer is forming an opinion about your market. Second, the traffic you have historically relied on from informational content may quietly decline, even if your rankings remain stable, because users are getting their answers before they click.

The brands that will maintain and grow organic visibility over the next few years are those that treat GEO as a complementary layer on top of their existing SEO strategy, not an alternative to it.

How GEO Differs from Traditional SEO

The core principles of SEO still apply: relevance, authority, and technical health all matter. But GEO shifts the emphasis in a few important ways.

Traditional SEO rewards pages that rank well for a target keyword. GEO rewards content that directly, accurately, and authoritatively answers a question. Keyword density becomes less important than question clarity.

E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness, has always been a Google ranking consideration. In a GEO context it becomes critical. AI systems are effectively running their own version of an E-E-A-T assessment when deciding which sources to reference. If your content does not demonstrate genuine expertise and is not backed by signals of authority (backlinks, brand mentions, structured author information), it is less likely to be selected. You can read more about how to improve your overall SEO in our separate guide.

Being cited by AI is also different from being found via a featured snippet. It is not about appearing in a box on the results page. It is about your content becoming part of the answer, often without a direct link back to your site at all, which makes brand entity signals more important than ever.

5 Practical GEO Tactics You Can Implement Now

1. Write to answer questions directly

AI systems look for content that clearly and concisely answers a specific question. Structure your content around questions your audience is genuinely asking. Lead with the answer in the first sentence or two, then provide supporting context. Avoid burying the key point deep in a paragraph.

2. Build topical authority through content clusters

A single well-optimised page is less likely to be cited by AI than a brand with consistent, comprehensive coverage of a topic. Develop a content cluster strategy: a core pillar page supported by a range of related articles that collectively signal authority in your subject area. Internal linking across these pages reinforces that authority both for users and for AI.

3. Use structured data and schema markup

Schema markup helps AI systems understand what your content is about and what type of entity your business is. Article schema, FAQ schema, and Organisation schema are all useful starting points. Structured data does not guarantee you will be cited, but it reduces ambiguity and makes your content easier to interpret.

4. Strengthen your brand entity signals

AI models build a picture of what your brand is through a range of signals: consistent name, address, and phone number across directories; third-party mentions and citations; author profiles with verifiable credentials; and links from authoritative external sources. If your brand entity is weak or inconsistent, AI has less reason to trust your content as a reference. This also connects to local SEO, where consistent entity signals play a significant role in how Google understands and represents your business.

5. Optimise for direct answer formats

Featured snippets and People Also Ask boxes are not exactly the same as AI citations, but the content that tends to win those positions is also the content AI tends to reference. Short, clear definitions, numbered lists, and structured comparisons all perform well in both contexts. If your content is not winning any featured snippets today, that is a useful diagnostic: your content may not be structured clearly enough for AI to use either.

How Do You Know If GEO Is Working?

This is one of the honest challenges of GEO in 2026: measurement is still developing. When AI cites your content and a user reads the answer without clicking, that visit does not appear in your analytics. You are generating brand awareness and potentially influencing a decision without any directly attributable traffic.

What you can monitor includes brand mention tracking using tools like Google Alerts or dedicated PR monitoring software, direct traffic trends (which can reflect brand awareness growth), and whether your content appears when you manually run relevant queries through AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity.

Google Search Console will also continue to be valuable for tracking featured snippet appearances and overall impressions for informational queries. If impressions are holding up but CTR is declining, that is a signal that AI answers may be absorbing traffic that would previously have come to your site. Keep an eye on Core Web Vitals too, as page experience continues to influence how Google assesses content quality.

What GEO Results Actually Look Like

New disciplines that are hard to measure deserve a bit of side-eye. So instead of telling you it works, here’s a client where we can show it.

Borg Locks make mechanical digital locks, properly British, properly engineered. We’d been running their SEO for a while when we started building out the GEO side. Such as the entity signals, the structured data, the authority work AI engines actually pay attention to. Then we watched what happened.

In a year, AI-referred traffic to their site jumped more than 1,000%. ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity all started sending real visitors that weren’t there before. Some of those people clicked through; plenty more got their answer straight from the AI without ever landing on the site. When we ran a sentiment scan across 185 prompts about the brand, every single one came back positive, with the models describing Borg Locks in terms of durability, security and build quality. So it wasn’t just name-dropping them. It was recommending them, for the right reasons.

The headline numbers are nice, but that’s not really the point. The point is that you can see it at all. Get the tracking right and GEO stops being a leap of faith and turns into something you can actually put in a report.

Start Preparing Now, Not Later

GEO is not a replacement for SEO. Your technical foundations, your content quality, and your authority signals all still matter enormously. But the way search is surfacing content is changing, and brands that adapt early will have a meaningful advantage.

The good news for SMEs is that the fundamentals of good GEO are also the fundamentals of good content strategy: answer questions clearly, demonstrate real expertise, and build consistent authority across your topic area.

At Repeat Digital, we help businesses navigate exactly this kind of shift. If you want to understand how your current content strategy holds up against AI search, or you are ready to build a GEO-informed approach from scratch, our SEO team is here to help. You can also find out more about our dedicated GEO and AEO services and what they involve.