GEO: how to show up in ChatGPT's answers when people search for your service

Try it now: ask ChatGPT “what is the best [your service] in [your town]?”. If your business does not come up, you have just seen your newest visibility problem — and the least contested one.

What GEO is

GEO — Generative Engine Optimization — is the practice of optimising a business’s presence in AI answer engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overview. SEO competes for positions in a list of links; GEO competes for something more valuable — being the direct recommendation inside an answer.

The difference in context matters. Someone handed ten links compares; someone handed two names trusts. A citation in an answer engine reaches the customer with the weight of a recommendation.

How the machines decide

Answer engines do not invent recommendations (when they work properly): they synthesise what they find. And they find best whoever makes the job easy for them:

• A clear entity. What you are, what you do, for whom, where. If your site says “integrated solutions for excellence”, no machine — and no person — knows what you sell. The definition has to be direct and consistent everywhere.
• Citable content. Two-sentence definitions, concrete numbers, direct answers to questions in natural language. A paragraph that properly answers “how much does X cost?” is raw material for a citation.
• Trust signals. Reviews, consistent local presence, structured data (schema.org), external mentions. The same signals as local SEO, read by a new kind of reader.
• Readable HTML. Critical content rendered in the HTML, not hidden behind JavaScript. Machines read what they can reach.

Why the window is now

Traditional SEO took a decade to saturate — today, competing for page one in competitive sectors is expensive. GEO is at the opposite moment: use of answer engines is growing fast and the overwhelming majority of local businesses do not yet know it exists. Whoever structures their presence first takes the citations — and citations, like rankings, tend to be conservative: whoever is there, stays there.

Where to start

1. Audit: ask the four engines the five questions your customers would ask. Record who appears.
2. Define: write the canonical definition of your business (what, for whom, where) and use it everywhere.
3. Structure: a real FAQ on the site, structured data, concrete numbers where competitors have adjectives.
4. Measure: repeat the audit monthly. Without measurement it is faith, not method.

GEO does not replace SEO — it grows on top of it. But anyone who treats answer engines the way they should have treated Google in 2010 will collect the same early-mover advantage.