Your next customer is asking ChatGPT. Are you the answer?

For twenty years, being found meant ranking. Now a growing share of your buyers never sees a results page: they ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity who to hire, what to buy, which product actually works, and they act on the answer. If the engines do not mention you, you did not lose the click. You never existed in the conversation.

GEO, defined without the mystique

Generative engine optimisation is the work of becoming the answer AI engines give. It sounds like magic and is mostly structure: engines cite sources they can parse, corroborate and trust. That means clean information architecture, structured data that states plainly what you are and what you sell, content written so a machine can lift an accurate answer from it, and third-party mentions that corroborate your claims, because engines weigh what others say about you more than what you say about yourself.

Why SEO and GEO are one discipline

Here is the part most agencies miss: the structure that ranks you is the structure engines cite. The same crawlable architecture, the same structured data, the same authoritative mentions serve both. Run them separately and you pay twice for the same foundation. Run them as one discipline and every technical fix compounds across both surfaces.

The differences are real but narrow. Rankings reward keywords and links; answers reward being quotable and corroborated. A page can rank and still be uncitable because the answer a machine needs is buried in brand prose. The fix is almost always to say the thing plainly, high on the page, in a form a machine can quote without guessing.

Answer share: making it a number

The discipline becomes manageable the moment you measure it. Take the questions your buyers actually ask, in their words, not yours. Ask each engine those questions on a fixed cadence. Record who gets named. That is your answer share, and its movement is the scoreboard for GEO work, the same way rankings are for SEO. Set the baseline before the work starts, or the after will mean nothing.

We run this measurement before writing a single line for a client, and we publish results only when a full window closes. Early numbers flatter everyone and inform no one.

Where to start

Ask an AI engine the question your best customer would ask before finding you. If a competitor is named and you are not, you have a GEO problem worth pricing. Then check whether your own site states, in one plain sentence a machine could quote, what you do and for whom. Most sites fail that test in the hero. Fixing that sentence is the cheapest optimisation in this entire discipline.

The engines are young, the habits are forming, and almost nobody in most industries is doing this work yet. That is precisely the window.