What Is GEO? How to Make Your Business Visible in AI Search

You have a website. It shows up on Google. You’ve put time and money into making that work.

But what happens when a potential customer opens ChatGPT and types: “Which plumber near me can fix a burst pipe today?” Or when they search Google and get an AI-generated answer at the top of the page, before they’ve seen a single link?

That’s a different kind of visibility. And it doesn’t work quite the same way as traditional search engine optimisation.

GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimization, is what determines whether your business gets mentioned when AI tools answer questions relevant to what you do.

Search isn’t the only place customers look anymore

Google AI Overviews launched in most English-speaking markets in 2024 and has been rolling out globally ever since. It’s the AI-generated summary that appears at the very top of a Google search, above all the usual results. Google’s AI Mode (a dedicated conversational tab) followed in 2025.

Meanwhile, the numbers on AI adoption are hard to ignore. According to SparkToro’s March 2025 analysis, Google still holds around 93.5% of global search market share. But one in five people in several developed markets already uses AI tools in place of a Google search for some queries, and that share is growing every month.

So there are now two parallel places where customers can find your business, or miss it entirely. One is the search results page you’ve always known. The other is the AI-generated answer, whether it comes from ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s own AI features.

How do AI tools decide who gets mentioned?

There’s no published rulebook for how AI tools choose their sources. But research from Princeton, Wharton, and independent analyses of millions of AI citations point to some consistent patterns.

What the AI already knows about you. All AI models are trained on enormous amounts of text from the internet. It matters whether your business is mentioned in independent sources: industry sites, reviews, local press, podcasts. An Ahrefs analysis of 75,000 brands found that the factor correlating most strongly with AI visibility isn’t the number of links pointing to your site. It’s how often your brand is mentioned by name across the web, whether or not those mentions include a clickable link.

What the AI finds when it searches right now. Most AI tools actively search the web when you ask them a question. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI features all pull from live pages and extract relevant passages. To show up there, your pages need to be accessible and indexed. An Ahrefs study of 17 million AI citations found that content cited by AI tools is on average 25% fresher than what ranks in standard Google results. ChatGPT showed the strongest preference for recent content, citing pages that were on average more than a year newer than typical Google organic results.

How your content is written. AI tools don’t read pages the way a person does. They’re looking for a passage that directly answers the question. An analysis of 1.2 million ChatGPT citations found that 44% of cited passages came from the first 30% of the text on a page. A page that opens with three paragraphs of background and company history before getting to the point risks being skipped entirely, regardless of how good the rest of the content is.

That’s the core shift GEO represents: writing so AI tools can extract a clear answer, and making sure your business is known and mentioned in the places AI tools learn from.

GEO and SEO: it’s not one or the other

It’s easy to get the impression that GEO is something entirely new that replaces everything you’ve done before. It isn’t.

SEO expert Aleyda Solís, who has tracked AI search systematically since 2024, describes GEO as fundamentally traditional SEO with a shifted emphasis. Google’s own representatives, including Danny Sullivan, have said that good SEO is good GEO in practice. It’s a view shared by most credible voices in the industry.

What changes is where the emphasis sits. Traditional SEO optimises a page to rank for a keyword. GEO optimises a passage to be extracted as an answer. Link authority still matters, but brand mentions now carry more weight. The nature of search queries is shifting too, with longer, more conversational questions that AI tools need to synthesise into a coherent response.

The practical conclusion is that you don’t need to undo what you’ve already built. A professional website with genuinely useful content is still the foundation. What you need to add is the right writing approach, and some active work on your presence beyond your own site.

Six things small businesses can do right now

Answer directly. Go through your most important pages and check whether they answer relevant questions early in the text. If your bathroom renovation page opens with three paragraphs about your history, start over. Put the answer to the most common question in the first paragraph. That’s what AI tools are looking for.

Be visible beyond your own website. Claim or update your profile on Google Business Profile, Trustpilot, and any industry-specific directories relevant to your sector. Make sure your business information is consistent across all of them. Research consistently shows that AI tools pull heavily from third-party sources when forming answers about local businesses, so being listed accurately and positively in those places matters.

Update your content regularly. You don’t need to publish new content every week. But pages that haven’t been touched in a year risk being passed over in favour of more current sources. A review and update of your five most important pages every quarter is enough to stay competitive in AI search.

Keep your information consistent everywhere. Your business name, address, and phone number need to match exactly across your website, Google Business Profile, and every directory where you’re listed. Inconsistencies make it harder for AI tools to connect the information and form a clear picture of who you are.

Check that AI tools can actually read your site. Some modern websites are built in a way that makes them effectively invisible to AI crawlers. This is most common with sites where content is loaded via JavaScript in the browser rather than delivered ready-made from the server. If you’re not sure how your site is built, it’s worth checking, particularly if it’s relatively new. Read more about what actually determines whether your website works in our guide to website fundamentals.

Add structured data to your site. Structured data, also known as schema markup, is a way of tagging your website so AI tools can more easily understand what your page is about, who you are, and what you offer. It’s not technically difficult to get started with, and it’s one of the few technical steps that demonstrably makes a difference for AI visibility. We cover this in detail in our guide to schema markup.

What GEO isn’t, and what you don’t need to worry about

There’s a lot of hype around GEO right now. Some agencies are selling “your ranking in ChatGPT” as though it were a stable, measurable thing. It isn’t.

SparkToro ran a study in January 2026 where they sent nearly 3,000 identical prompts through ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI. The results were clear: the probability of two runs returning the same list of brands in the same order is less than one in a thousand. AI answers vary significantly from one query to the next.

That means AI visibility isn’t a ranking number you can track on a dashboard. It’s something you build over time by doing the right things consistently, and you measure it by how often your brand gets mentioned when you ask AI tools to answer questions relevant to your industry.

It’s also worth keeping AI search in proportion right now. Traditional Google results still dominate. Google holds around 93.5% of global search market share (SparkToro, March 2025), and AI referral traffic currently accounts for roughly 1% of total website traffic for most businesses. The customers who click through from an AI tool are a small fraction of your total visitors.

But they convert better. Semrush measured that visitors from AI tools convert 4.4 times better than standard organic search traffic. The volume is low; the quality is high. And as a behaviour, the shift is under way: a growing share of consumers is already using AI tools in place of traditional search for at least some queries.

GEO is about building the right foundations now, so you’re ready when that shift becomes larger. It’s not an emergency. But it’s not something to ignore either.

Want to know how your business actually appears when someone asks ChatGPT about your industry? We can take a look. Read more about our AI visibility report.

Frequently asked questions about GEO

Sources and references

• Aggarwal et al., GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, ACM KDD 2024 / Princeton University. Quantitative effects of content-level tactics on AI visibility; documented visibility lifts of 37–41%. arxiv.org/abs/2311.09735
• Ahrefs, New Study: AI Assistants Prefer to Cite “Fresher” Content (17 Million Citations Analyzed), July 2025. AI-cited content averages 25% fresher than organic Google results. ahrefs.com
• Ahrefs, How to Rank on ChatGPT: What Actually Works (Based on Data), 2025. Analysis of 75,000 brands; brand mentions correlate with AI visibility at roughly 3x the strength of backlinks. ahrefs.com
• Kevin Indig / Radiant Elephant, What Actually Works in GEO: 15 Evidence-Backed Tactics and 7 Speculative Ones, 2025. Analysis of 1.2 million ChatGPT citations. radiantelephant.com
• SparkToro / Rand Fishkin & Patrick O’Donnell, AIs Are Highly Inconsistent When Recommending Brands, January 2026. Study of 2,961 prompts; less than 1-in-1,000 chance of identical brand list across two runs. sparktoro.com
• Semrush, How Google’s AI Mode Compares to Traditional Search and Other LLMs, 2025. Conversion rate data for AI-referred traffic vs. standard organic search. semrush.com
• SparkToro / Datos, Zero-Click Search and AI Traffic Share, March 2025. Google at 93.5% global search market share. sparktoro.com
• Aleyda Solís, SEO vs GEO: Optimizing for Traditional vs AI Search, 2025. aleydasolis.com