Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of making your website easy for AI systems such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews to find, understand and cite when they generate answers. It builds on SEO rather than replacing it, with extra focus on clear, quotable, well structured content.
Why It Matters for Your Website
More buyers now ask an AI assistant for a shortlist before they ever open a search results page. If your company is not described clearly on your own site, the assistant fills the gap with whatever it finds elsewhere: an old press piece, a competitor's comparison page, or nothing at all. That matters most in the weeks after a funding round, a launch or a press cycle, when people are actively checking who you are.
GEO is not a separate channel you can buy your way into. No one can guarantee that a model will cite you. What you can control is whether your site gives these systems accurate, crawlable, specific material to work with. Most of that work is the same work that makes a site credible to humans.
A practical test: ask two or three assistants what your company does and who it is for. If the answers are vague, outdated or wrong, your site is not giving them enough to work with.
What Good Looks Like
Each key page opens with a plain statement of what you do, who it is for and what makes you different, in words a model could quote without editing.
Your pages render real text in the HTML, not only inside images, videos or scripts that crawlers may skip.
Your robots.txt does not accidentally block the AI crawlers you want to reach you, and you have made a deliberate choice about the ones you do block.
Facts such as pricing model, locations, integrations and customer types are stated consistently across your site, your profiles and your press pages.
Pages answer the questions buyers actually ask, with headings that match those questions.
You track how AI assistants describe your brand for a set of priority prompts and review it on a schedule.
Questions to Ask an Agency
How will you measure whether AI assistants describe us more accurately after this work, and against which prompts?
Which parts of this are standard SEO, and which parts are genuinely specific to generative engines?
What will you change on the site itself, and what depends on mentions and coverage elsewhere?
How do you check that our pages are crawlable by the AI bots we care about?
What will you refuse to promise, and why?
How Goodspeed Handles It
We treat GEO as part of a site health check, not a mystery add on. Our two week Tune-Up audit and fixes reviews how clearly your key pages state what you do, whether AI and search crawlers can read them, and where your messaging is inconsistent. Then we fix the highest impact issues inside the same two weeks. Google publishes its own guidance on AI features and your website, and it is a good baseline for any plan.
Related Terms
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
llms.txt
Schema Markup
Website Audit