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Your customers are no longer just Googling. Our generative engine optimisation services cover the structure, schema and corroboration an engine needs before it will name you. Our GEO services cover exactly that.
They are asking ChatGPT who to trust. They are asking Perplexity what the best option is. They are asking Google AI Overviews which business to choose.
If your business is not showing up in those answers, you are losing customers at the exact moment they are ready to buy: and you probably do not even know it.
What Is Generative Engine Optimisation? | GEO services
Generative Engine Optimisation is the structured engineering of website content so that AI systems can confidently select it, summarise it, and cite it when users ask relevant questions.
Where SEO targets Google rankings, GEO targets citation eligibility across AI platforms. It is about making your business the answer AI tools give when someone asks a question in your category.
With around 60% of Google searches now ending without a click, thanks to AI Overviews, featured snippets and zero-click summaries, being number one on Google is no longer enough on its own. You need to be the business AI recommends.
What our generative engine optimisation services include
GEO Audit
We analyse how ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews currently see your business. What they know about you, what they get wrong, and what is stopping them from recommending you. Every engagement starts here.
Entity Optimisation
AI tools build a picture of your business from everything they can find online. We make sure that picture is accurate, consistent and authoritative: across your website, your listings, your social profiles and every mention of your brand on the web.
Content Restructuring
We rewrite and restructure your existing content so AI systems can extract, understand and cite it. That means clear definitions, question-and-answer formats, structured data and content that gives AI tools exactly what they need to recommend you with confidence.
Schema and Structured Data
We build the trust signals: structured data, entity clarity and author credibility: so AI systems recognise your business as a reliable source. Schema is one of the fastest and most impactful GEO fixes most SME websites are missing entirely.
Citation and Authority Building
AI tools only recommend businesses they trust. We build the reviews, mentions, backlinks and citations that tell AI platforms your business is credible, established and worth surfacing.
Ongoing Monitoring and Reporting
We track how your business appears across the major AI platforms month on month: what you are being cited for, where you are showing up, and what is changing. No vanity metrics. Just clear reporting tied to visibility and enquiries.
How We Work: The Four-Step GEO Engagement
Every engagement follows the same four steps. You can repeat them to anyone who asks what a GEO agency actually does all month.
Step 1. Baseline your AI visibility
We ask the engines a fixed set of questions a real buyer would ask, and we save every answer verbatim, dated, with the engine named. Where you are cited, where competitors are cited instead, and where nothing can be verified, it all goes in the baseline. Gaps are reported as loudly as wins.
Step 2. Find out why
We audit the things an AI engine actually reads: your entity signals, structured data, crawler access, and the third-party sources engines lean on when they corroborate a claim. Every finding is tied to evidence you can check, not a score pulled from the air.
Step 3. Fix what the engines are tripping on
Content restructured so answers are liftable, schema that says in code what your pages say in prose, and citation building so the engines find agreement about you elsewhere. Work is prioritised by what the baseline showed, not by a template.
Step 4. Re-run the questions and report citation share
Each cycle we re-run the same question set and report your citation share against named competitors: how often you are named, how you are described, and what changed since last time. Same questions, same engines, saved answers. That is the only honest way to show movement.
Why GEO Matters for SMEs Right Now
Most of your competitors have not started yet.
UK businesses investing in GEO in 2026 can expect higher visibility across generative search engines as more users turn to these engines for research, recommendations and purchasing decisions.
The businesses that move first own the category. The ones that wait will be playing catch-up while their competitors are already being recommended by every major AI platform.
Who This Is For
We work with SMEs across medical aesthetics, financial services, home services, and coaching and consulting.
You do not need to be a large brand to benefit from GEO. In fact, SMEs often see faster results than enterprise businesses because the competition in their category is still low.
If your customers are using AI to find services like yours: and they are: you need to be in those answers.
GEO vs SEO: What Is the Difference?
SEO gets you ranking on Google. GEO gets you recommended by AI.
GEO is not replacing SEO. Traditional SEO fundamentals: technical health, quality content, backlinks, structured data: remain essential because LLMs and AI search engines heavily rely on the open web as their source of truth. The best approach in 2026 is an integrated SEO and GEO strategy.
That is exactly how we work at The GEO Agency. Every GEO engagement is built on solid SEO foundations: because one without the other leaves gaps your competitors will fill.
How an AI engine decides whether to name your business
Most GEO advice jumps straight to tactics without saying what it is actually optimising for. An engine does three things in sequence, and a business can fail at any one of them.
It retrieves. The engine gathers candidate sources, from its training data, from a live search, or from both. If your pages are not crawlable, not indexed, or too far down for a live search to surface, nothing after this matters. This is the stage most businesses assume they have already passed.
It extracts. From those candidates it pulls the specific passage that answers the question. Structure decides this. A page that answers in one clear passage, near a heading matching the question, is easy to extract from. A page where the answer is spread across several paragraphs of preamble is not, even when the answer is better.
It corroborates. Before naming you, the engine looks for agreement elsewhere. A claim that appears only on your own site carries less weight than the same claim reflected in a directory, a review platform, a press mention or an industry register. This is why GEO is not purely an on-page discipline, and why businesses with good content still go uncited.
Five reasons a business never gets cited
- The answer is buried. It arrives in paragraph six, after the scene setting. Engines extract passages, not whole pages.
- Headings do not match the question. “Our Approach” tells an engine nothing. A heading phrased as the question a person actually asks gives it something to extract against.
- No structured data. Without schema the engine has to infer what your page is and which organisation stands behind it. Inference favours whoever did not make it guess.
- Nothing corroborates the claim. It exists only on your site, so the engine treats it as marketing rather than fact.
- The copy hedges. Writing that avoids committing to anything gives an engine nothing quotable.
What a GEO agency should be measuring, and how often
GEO without measurement is decoration. What makes it defensible is that every claim about your visibility carries a date, an engine name and a saved answer behind it.
- Named engines, not “AI”. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews checked separately. They disagree constantly, and an average across them hides what you need to see.
- A fixed question set. The same questions each run, so movement means something. Ad hoc spot checks feel productive and prove nothing.
- Verbatim answers, saved and dated. Not a score with no working shown. You can read what the engine said, including the runs where it said nothing about you.
- Gaps reported as loudly as wins. The questions where you did not appear are the working list.
One caveat, stated up front rather than buried: AI answers fluctuate between runs and between users. A single check is one data point from one session, never a verdict. That is exactly why measurement is repeated on a schedule rather than screenshotted once.
What GEO cannot do
It cannot guarantee a citation, and a guarantee tells you something unflattering about whoever offered it. It cannot make a weak business look strong, because corroboration comes from independent sources you do not control. It cannot work instantly: technical fixes register within weeks, but shifting what an engine says in an open recommendation question depends on how much independent proof already exists. And it cannot substitute for having something worth citing. Structure makes good material findable, it does not create it.
Related reading
Start with what generative engine optimisation actually is, then GEO vs SEO explained. For the neighbouring disciplines see AEO, SEO and reputation and trust. Google’s own guidance on structured data is published at Search Central.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is GEO and How does it work?
Generative Engine Optimisation is the process of making your business visible and citable in AI-generated answers. It works by optimising your content structure, entity signals, schema markup and online authority so AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini can confidently recommend your business
How is GEO different from SEO?
SEO optimises your website for Google search rankings. GEO optimises your business to be recommended by AI tools directly in their answers. In 2026 you need both working together. Weak SEO foundations undermine your GEO visibility and vice versa.
How long does GEO take to show results?
Most clients see measurable improvements in AI visibility within 90 days. Some changes, particularly technical fixes and schema implementation, can show results within weeks.
Can a small business benefit from GEO?
Yes. Small business often see faster GEO results than larger businesses because competition in most local and specialist categories is still low. Getting in early means owning the category before your competitors catch on.
Which AI Platforms do you optimise for?
We optimise for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and Google AI Overviews, the platforms your customers are most likely using to find businesses like yours.
How do you measure GEO results?
We track citation frequency, AI platform visibility and share of voice across a defined set of queries relevant to your business. You get a clear monthly report showing where you are being surfaced, what you are being cited for and what has changed.
Can you guarantee we will be cited by ChatGPT?
No, and nobody can. Answers vary between runs and between users, and no agency controls what a model outputs. What we commit to is measurement discipline: the same question set, named engines, dated verbatim answers, and the gaps reported alongside the wins.
How is GEO measured?
A fixed set of questions run across named engines on a set schedule, with every answer saved verbatim and dated. You can read exactly what each engine said, including the runs where it said nothing. Where something cannot be confirmed it is recorded as not verified rather than counted as absent.
What does a GEO agency actually change?
Usually four things: how answers are structured and positioned on the page, headings rewritten to match the questions people ask, schema so the engine does not have to guess what your content is, and the identity signals that let it confirm your organisation is who it says it is.
Will GEO work if our content is thin?
Not on its own. Structure makes good material findable, it does not create it. If a page has nothing substantive to say, restructuring produces a well organised page with nothing to cite. The content work comes first.
How much of our time does GEO work need?
Less than you would think, but not zero. Expect a short kickoff to agree your question set and priority topics, a monthly review of the saved answers and citation share report, and occasional sign-off where a fix touches your site or your claims about the business. The technical work, testing and reporting are ours. Approving what is said about your business stays yours.
Do you work alongside an existing SEO agency or in-house team?
Yes, and it usually works well. GEO builds on solid SEO foundations rather than replacing them, so we stay in our lane: AI citation, entity signals, answer structure and corroboration. Where a fix overlaps, crawler access or schema for example, we hand your team the exact change with the evidence behind it, and they implement it in their own workflow if they prefer.