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 the US in 2024 and by May 2025 had expanded to more than 200 countries and 40 languages, Sweden among them. 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, and in October 2025 it expanded to more than 40 new countries.
Meanwhile, the shift in how people search is hard to ignore. SparkToro’s analysis of the first four months of 2026 found that 68% of Google searches now end without a click to any website at all — the fastest acceleration in a decade, driven largely by AI features and instant answers in the results page.
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 the research paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization from Princeton and Georgia Tech, presented at the ACM KDD 2024 conference, along with independent analyses of millions of AI citations, points 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. Ahrefs’ analysis of 75,000 brands (2025) 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. Ahrefs’ study of 17 million AI citations (July 2025) 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. In Kevin Indig’s analysis of ChatGPT citations (February 2026), 44% of citations 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.
GEO is fundamentally ordinary search optimisation with a shifted emphasis. Google says in its documentation on AI features that there are no additional technical requirements for appearing in AI answers beyond those for ordinary search.
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. This is the practical side of the Ahrefs finding above: since off-site brand mentions correlate more strongly with AI visibility than links do, being listed accurately and positively in third-party sources is what moves the needle.
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. Don’t treat it as a shortcut: Google’s documentation on AI features says no special structured data is needed to appear there. But it helps machines understand who you are, and Microsoft has said that Bing’s language models use it. 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 and Gumshoe.ai published a study on 28 January 2026 in which 600 volunteers ran twelve brand-recommendation prompts a combined 2,961 times across ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s AI, with the data gathered over November and December 2025. The results were clear: the probability of two runs of the same prompt returning the same list of brands is under one in a hundred, and the chance they also come back in the same order is closer to 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: Statcounter’s worldwide search engine tracker put Google at 89.9% of global search in September 2026. The customers who click through from an AI tool are still a small fraction of your total visitors.
But they convert better. Semrush calculated in 2025 that the average visitor from AI search is worth 4.4 times as much as one from traditional organic search, based on conversion rate. 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.
How many of your own customers find you through AI rarely shows up in your analytics. The simplest way to find out is to ask new customers how they found you, with AI tools among the options.
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.
The quickest way to see where your business lands is the test we describe in a separate article: four questions in four AI tools, ten minutes. If you want the same thing done systematically, with more questions and compared with your competitors, that’s our AI visibility audit.