What Is GEO, and How Do You Actually Do It?

Most of what gets sold as GEO is SEO with a markup on it. That does not mean the work is fake. It means the honest version is narrower, less glamorous, and worth understanding before anybody quotes you for it.

What does GEO actually mean?

Generative engine optimisation is the work of getting generative AI tools to know who you are, describe you correctly, and put you forward when somebody asks them a question your business answers.

The important word is generative. These tools do not hand back a list of ten links for you to choose from. They produce an answer. Either you are named in it or you are not, and there is no second page to be on.

Where does an AI actually get its answer?

Not from a register of businesses that somebody submitted you to. It reads the ordinary web, and when it needs something current it searches, largely reading what already ranks.

That matters more than any clever technique, because it means the first half of GEO is just being visible in normal search. If you are on page two for the obvious questions in your trade, you are not in the material it draws from.

The second half is everything written about you that you did not write yourself.

So what is the work?

Four things, in the order I would do them.

1. Make sure the crawlers can reach you. A surprising number of sites turn these bots away without anyone having decided to. OpenAI lists its crawlers and the controls for them, and five minutes in your robots file settles it. Nothing else on this list counts while the door is shut.

2. Answer the questions properly, on your own site. Not a brochure page. The actual questions: what a job costs, how long it takes, what goes wrong, whether a licence is needed. Google's guidance on creating helpful content is the same standard an AI applies, because it is reading the same pages.

3. Get written about somewhere that is not yours. Trade bodies, suppliers, local press, genuine directories, a manufacturer's approved installer list. Anything on your own domain is marketing and is treated as such. A third party naming you is evidence.

4. Keep your facts identical everywhere. Name, address, phone, hours, services. Where two sources disagree, neither can be relied on, and the safe move for anything assembling an answer is to use a business whose details do not argue with themselves.

What about the technical side?

Structured data helps, and it is cheap to add properly. Google's LocalBusiness markup is the one that matters for a service business, because it states your hours, areas and services in a form that does not have to be interpreted from prose.

What it will not do is manufacture authority you have not got. Markup describes you accurately. It does not argue for you.

How do you measure it?

Badly, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. There is no rank tracker that reports what every AI said to every person who asked.

What you can do:

• Ask the tools yourself, monthly, using the questions your customers would ask
• Watch whether referral traffic from AI tools appears in your analytics at all
• Track the ordinary search visibility underneath it, which moves first and is measurable

Is it worth paying for?

For most trade and service businesses, not before the basics are right. Normal search is still where nearly all the work comes from, and a half-finished Google Business Profile is a cheaper win than anything on this page.

Where it genuinely costs money is the third item on that list. Earning a mention in a real publication occasionally means paying for the placement, which is an expense rather than an hour of work. It is also the part that moves the needle on how you get described, which is why the AI side of what I do is an add-on to the search work rather than something sold alone.

If you want to start somewhere free: go and ask ChatGPT who it would recommend for your trade in your town, and read the answer properly. That tells you more about where you stand than any proposal will.