GEO stands for generative engine optimization: making sure that AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews mention your company and point to your site. SEO aims at a position in a list of links, GEO aims at a mention in one composed answer. The difference is that a list has ten places and an answer often only three. Anyone who is not mentioned does not exist for that visitor.
From ten links to one answer
Classic search results give you a list. You click, you compare, you choose. With an AI answer the comparing happens before your screen: the system reads a number of sources, weighs them and delivers one text in which perhaps three parties are named. The rest does not appear.
That makes the distribution harder. Position eight in Google still brings visitors. Not being mentioned in an AI answer brings nothing, not even a little.
At the same time the game is more open than it looks. An answer engine picks sources that answer the question concretely, not necessarily the best known brands. A small company with one sharply written page about a specific question stands a better chance there than with ten thousand euros of advertising.
The core distinction: readiness and visibility
This is the point where most advice about GEO falls apart. There are two different things and they are constantly confused.
Readiness is what you can measure on your site: are the AI crawlers allowed in, is there structured data, can the text be read from the server HTML without JavaScript, is the heading hierarchy sound. That can be established objectively and repaired with bounded effort.
Visibility is whether you actually get mentioned. You can only measure that by asking the machines themselves.
A site can score ten out of ten on readiness and appear in no answer at all. That is not a contradiction: readiness is the condition, not a promise. Anyone who sells GEO as a technical checklist sells half of it.
The four factors that decide whether you get cited
Access. Are the AI crawlers allowed to read your site? That is set in robots.txt. In practice this is the most common cause of invisibility and almost always unintended: a security plugin, a CDN setting or a default rule from a theme blocks bots that nobody deliberately excluded. What matters is the distinction between the crawlers. Some collect training data, others handle the display in the search results of an assistant, still others fetch a page after a user clicks a link. Anyone who only shuts out the training bots does not shut themselves out of citations. Anyone who shuts out everything does.
Structure. Structured data and a clean heading hierarchy make your text machine-processable. A language model that recognises an organisation, a service and a question with an answer as such has nothing left to guess. This weighs more heavily for GEO than for classic SEO, where it mainly produces rich results.
Quotability. Concrete numbers, clear definitions and questions with answers get taken over. Marketing language does not. "Considerably more expensive than expected" is quoted by no model. "Two to five times the quote over five years" is. If you take one thing away from this chapter, take this one.
Mentions outside your own site. Answer engines lean heavily on what third parties write about you. Your profile in a professional network, your register entry, trade media, solid business directories. This factor is the slowest to influence and at the same time the heaviest.
Where SEO and GEO overlap and where they do not
| Topic | Counts for SEO | Counts for GEO |
|---|---|---|
| HTTPS, speed, mobile | yes | indirectly, through crawlability |
| Title and description | yes, it decides the click | barely, because there is no snippet to click |
| One H1 and tidy headings | moderate | yes, it is the map of your page |
| Structured data | moderate, for rich results | heavy |
| Access for AI crawlers | no | decisive |
| Concrete figures in the text | moderate | heavy |
| External mentions | yes | heavy |
| Keyword density | outdated | irrelevant |
Most good SEO is also good GEO. The reverse does not hold: you can rank excellently and still never be cited, because your pages nowhere answer a question in a form that can be taken over.
What GEO is not
It is not a new meta tag and not a trick. There is no setting you switch on to get mentioned. Anyone who sells that sells air.
It is not a replacement for SEO either. The AI layer runs largely on the same index. A site that cannot be found in the classic way cannot be found by an answer engine either.
And it is not equally advanced everywhere. In our own baseline measurement in August 2026 not one of fifteen Dutch-language searches in Belgium produced a Google AI Overview. In that language and that region the layer therefore barely exists yet and for now only classic SEO counts. In English the picture is different. Anyone who tells you that AI answers are already eating your traffic today has probably not measured that for your market.
How you know whether it works
Only by measuring it. A fixed set of questions, asked every month in the same way to the same engines, logged out and without conversation history. That yields three figures: in how many answers you are mentioned, what share you hold of all the parties named and how prominent the mention is.
For calibration, our own baseline measurement of 2 August 2026, fifteen questions per engine:
| Engine | Mentioned | Brand questions | Questions without a brand name |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT with search | 5 of 15 | 3 of 3 | 2 of 6 |
| Perplexity | 3 of 15 | 3 of 3 | 0 of 6 |
| Claude with search | 4 of 15 | 3 of 3 | 1 of 6 |
| Google AI Overviews | 0 of 15 | no overview shown | no overview shown |
Read this as it is meant. Answering brand questions works almost always once your site is indexed, that is the floor and not an achievement. The questions without a brand name are the real test and there almost everyone starts at zero. The yield of that first measurement lies not in your own score but in the list of competitors that do get named. For us it produced four parties we did not know and that position themselves almost identically.
How you set up that measurement exactly is in chapter 9.
What an SMB would do today
- Check whether the AI crawlers are allowed in. Five minutes of work and it is the only factor that can change everything.
- Put Organization or LocalBusiness schema on every page and Service schema on every service page.
- Write one paragraph per service that literally answers the question of who you are and what you do, in plain sentences without marketing language.
- Put your concrete figures, amounts and thresholds in the text instead of in a sales conversation.
- Do a baseline measurement and repeat it monthly. Without a time series you never know whether steps 1 to 4 did anything.
Steps 1 to 3 are half a day of work and deliver the largest part of the technical gain. Step 4 is the real work and that is where the competition drops out.
Frequently asked questions
What does GEO mean in marketing?
GEO stands for generative engine optimization: optimising a website so that AI answer engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews mention the company and refer to it. It is not the same as geographic or local optimisation, despite the name.
Does GEO replace classic SEO?
No. The AI layer runs largely on the same search index, so a site that cannot be found in the classic way cannot be found by an answer engine either. GEO comes on top of SEO and shifts the emphasis to structured data, access for AI crawlers and quotable formulations.
How do I know whether ChatGPT mentions my company?
By testing it with a fixed set of questions, in a logged-out session without conversation history, every month in the same way. A logged-in account that already knows your company gives a false positive.
Should I allow AI crawlers on my website?
If you want to be mentioned in AI answers, yes. There is a difference between bots that collect training data and bots that handle the display in the search results of an assistant. You can refuse the first and allow the second.
What is llms.txt and do I need it?
A markdown file in the root of your site that summarises your company, your offer and your most important pages for language models. It is not a standard and the evidence that it works is thin. It costs nothing and it does no harm. See chapter 8.
Would you rather not do this yourself: SEMANU carries out the full SEO and GEO audit for 1,450 euro, report and working session included. What it covers is on the guide page.
Measurability and findability belong in your software strategy
Measurability and findability are part of strategic advice, not a separate discipline. If you would rather not do this yourself, we take it up in the software strategy: what you measure, which threshold justifies an action and who follows it up.