Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the practice of structuring your website and content so that AI engines such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini and Perplexity use it as a source and name your brand in their answers. Traditional SEO competes for a position on a results page. GEO competes for a citation inside the answer itself.
We are Delivix, a web design and SEO studio in Glasgow, and GEO is part of our paid client work. This guide is also our own test bed: the page you are reading is structured the way we structure client pages, and later on we share its actual Search Console numbers so you can judge the approach against evidence rather than promises.
Contents
- What GEO means
- Where the term comes from
- How AI engines choose their sources
- GEO and SEO in one minute
- What actually works
- Our own numbers
- A GEO checklist you can run today
- When to bring in help
- Frequently asked questions
What GEO means
When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation or Google shows an AI Overview above the results, that answer is assembled from a small set of source pages. GEO is the work of becoming one of those sources. The spelling varies (optimisation here, optimization in the US) and you will also see close cousins like AEO and AIO, but the goal is the same: when an AI engine answers a question your customers ask, your content supplies the answer and your brand gets the mention.
That last part matters commercially. An AI answer often ends the search, so the brands named inside it collect the trust, and everyone below it collects nothing. This page is its own proof: 44,873 impressions in Google over 16 months produced just 9 clicks, because the query gets answered on the results page and the click never happens. That is exactly why the citation itself has become the asset worth competing for.
Where the term comes from
GEO is unusual among marketing terms in having a precise origin. It was coined in a 2023 research paper, GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Aggarwal and colleagues, presented at the KDD 2024 conference. The researchers tested content changes across a large benchmark of search queries and measured how often generative engines cited the modified pages.
Two findings from that paper still shape how we work. First, the right changes lifted visibility in AI answers by up to 40%, so this is not folklore; it moves a measurable number. Second, the tactics that worked were about credibility, not keywords. Adding citations to reputable sources, quoting named experts, and including specific statistics all improved visibility. Old-fashioned keyword stuffing did nothing useful. AI engines reward pages that read like evidence.
How AI engines choose their sources
Every generative engine follows roughly the same three steps, and each step is a place you can win or lose.
1. Retrieval. The engine fetches candidate pages, usually leaning on conventional search indexes. If your pages rank nowhere and block AI crawlers such as GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot, you fall out here, before content quality is even considered.
2. Extraction. The model reads the candidates and pulls out passages that answer the question. Clear, self-contained passages survive this step. Pages that take four paragraphs to reach the point get skimmed past, however good the information buried inside them.
3. Synthesis and citation. The engine writes its answer and attributes claims to the sources it trusted most. Consistent brand information across the web, schema that confirms who you are, and mentions on sites the model already trusts all tilt this step in your favour.
GEO and SEO in one minute
GEO is not a rival to SEO; it is the next layer on top of it. Retrieval still runs on search infrastructure, so a page with no organic visibility rarely gets cited, and the foundations (crawlability, speed, authority) serve both. The difference is the unit of competition. SEO optimises a page to rank for a query. GEO optimises passages to be quoted in an answer. We keep the two disciplines under one roof through our SEO service, and if you want the full side-by-side, our GEO vs SEO comparison covers it properly.
What actually works
Here is what we implement for clients, ordered by where it acts in the pipeline, with an honest effort rating for each.
| Tactic | What it influences | Effort |
|---|---|---|
| Unblock AI crawlers (robots.txt, firewall, CDN rules) | Retrieval: engines can fetch you at all | Low |
| Publish llms.txt as an AI-facing index of your key pages | Retrieval: guides crawlers to what matters | Low |
| Definition-first passages: answer in the first sentence, explain after | Extraction: quotable text | Medium |
| FAQ sections backed by FAQPage schema | Extraction: pre-packaged questions and answers | Medium |
| Original data and named statistics | Citation: models prefer sources with evidence | Medium |
| Consistent name, address and entity details everywhere | Citation: confirms you are who you claim | Medium |
| Mentions and citations on sites models already trust | Citation: borrowed authority | High |
| Refresh dates and content on pages that earn citations | Retrieval and citation: engines favour current sources | Ongoing |
The pattern across the whole table: everything that works makes your content easier to verify. That is also why fabricated statistics are a trap. A model that cannot corroborate your claim elsewhere has a reason to pick a different source.
Two of these deserve their own reading if you want depth. Structuring passages for extraction is covered in our guide to optimising content for AI-generated responses, and the trust side is covered in E-E-A-T in GEO.
Our own numbers
We said this page is a test bed, so here is its report card. In the 16 months to July 2026, this URL earned 44,873 impressions in Google search. For the query "geo meaning" it averaged position 1, and for "what is geo" (7,437 impressions) it averaged position 8.9. On the head term "generative engine optimisation", where the results above us include Wikipedia, Semrush and Google's own documentation, it sat around position 82. That gap is the honest part: definitional passages win first-page placements long before a small studio outranks the giants on a head term. It is also the GEO opportunity in one sentence.
The same principles run through our client work. For Research Prospect we rebuilt content structure and depth across the site, and organic traffic grew 107.7% with more than 30 keywords reaching page one. Those page-one placements matter for GEO too, because pages that rank are the pages engines retrieve.
A GEO checklist you can run today
Copy this and work through it. It is the same sequence we follow in a first-month engagement.
- Crawler access. Fetch your robots.txt and confirm GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended are not blocked. Check firewall and CDN bot rules too.
- Baseline. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI mode the five questions your customers actually ask. Record which brands get named. Repeat monthly.
- Passage audit. Open your top pages and read only the first sentence under each heading. If it does not answer the heading on its own, rewrite until it does.
- Schema. Add FAQPage markup to genuine FAQs, Article markup with a named author to guides, and Organisation or LocalBusiness markup that matches your real details.
- Evidence. Replace every vague claim with a number, a source, or a named example. Delete the claims you cannot back.
- Entity consistency. Make sure your name, address and service descriptions match across your site, Google Business Profile and directories.
- llms.txt. Publish one listing your key pages. We do this on delivix.digital and it takes an afternoon.
When to bring in help
If your site is small and your content is already honest and well structured, the checklist above may be all you need. Bring in an agency when the restructuring is bigger than you can resource: hundreds of pages, schema across templates, or an authority gap that needs a proper citation campaign. That work is our AIO and GEO service, run by the same two senior people who do our SEO, with engagements from £1,500. Tell us what you are trying to rank for and we will give you a straight answer on whether GEO is worth your money yet, because for some businesses it is not.