Generative Engine Optimization
Get cited inside AI answers · ChatGPT · Claude · Perplexity · Google AI Overviews
Search has split. When a founder asks ChatGPT for "the best fractional marketing director in Leeds," your business is either in the answer or it isn't. Generative Engine Optimization is the structured work to make sure you're the one being named.
For founders whose buyers
are already asking AI
SEO is no longer the only doorway. Customers ask ChatGPT for vendor shortlists, ask Claude to compare options, ask Perplexity for a recommendation with sources. If your business isn't in the training data and isn't being cited, you're not in the conversation — and you won't see it in Google Analytics either.
Founders typically come to a GEO engagement when one or more of these is true:
- You're winning on Google but you've never been mentioned by an AI assistant — and you've checked.
- A competitor's name keeps surfacing in ChatGPT answers and you don't know why.
- Your inbound used to come from organic search and the volume has visibly softened in the last 12 months.
- You sell to a buyer who runs early-stage research through AI before they ever land on your site.
- You've heard "GEO" referenced and want to know whether it's a real thing for your business or marketing-team theatre.
Make your business citable
- AI visibility audit — how your brand currently surfaces (or doesn't) inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, against the actual queries your buyers are running.
- Citable-content build-out — restructuring your highest-leverage pages so AI assistants can confidently extract, cite, and summarise them. Schema, headings, FAQ patterns, factual density, the unglamorous mechanics that decide whether an LLM trusts the source.
- Source-of-truth assets — the founder-quotes, pricing pages, comparison pages, and methodology pages that AI assistants need to confidently include you in their answers.
- Third-party signal map — the directories, review sites, and corpora AI models lean on for grounding. Where you need to be listed, what to say, and which signals matter more than others.
- Tracking + re-audit — a repeatable way to monitor AI mentions over time, so improvement is visible instead of vibes-based.
A structured engagement,
not a deck
-
01
Audit (week 1)
We run your real buyer queries through the major AI assistants and capture how (and whether) you're mentioned, who is, and what they're being trusted to say. Baseline established, gaps named.
-
02
Plan (week 2)
A prioritised action list — pages to build, pages to restructure, third-party signals to fix, off-site placements to chase. Sequenced by impact, not by what's easy to ship.
-
03
Build (weeks 3–5)
Citable-content build-out, schema/markup, founder-quote assets, third-party listings. Done with you, or done for you — your call. Either way, it ships.
-
04
Re-audit (week 6)
Same queries, same models, side-by-side comparison. What moved, what didn't, what's the next 90-day push. A repeatable rhythm so this is a discipline, not a one-off project.
Good questions, straight answers
Is GEO different from SEO?
There's overlap, but yes. SEO optimises for a ranked list on a results page. GEO optimises for being one of the names cited inside a generative answer. Different mechanics, different signals, different feedback loops — and AI models give very different weight to things like factual density, schema, third-party corpus presence, and named-entity disambiguation than Google's classic ranker does.
Will this hurt our existing search rankings?
No. The work strengthens the same underlying signals — better-structured content, clearer entity definitions, real schema, cleaner internal linking — that still help organic rankings. We don't write for robots in ways that read badly to humans; founders read every page before it ships.
How quickly do AI assistants pick up changes?
Faster than Google ever did. Retrieval-augmented models can surface new pages within days; the underlying training corpora roll forward in months rather than years. The honest answer: you'll see movement on retrieval-based assistants (Perplexity, AI Overviews) inside a few weeks; foundational-model mentions move on a slower cadence and benefit from third-party signal work.
Can I just keep doing SEO and call it good?
For now, if your category isn't AI-led, you might be fine. For most B2B services and considered-purchase categories, buyer behaviour has already shifted — the early-stage research is happening in ChatGPT before it's happening on Google. The risk isn't that organic dies. It's that the top-of-funnel quietly moves somewhere your tracking can't see.
Is this a retainer or a project?
A four-to-six week fixed-fee engagement. If you want ongoing quarterly re-audits and content refresh afterwards, that's available — but it isn't the assumption. Most founders run a GEO engagement once a year and keep the discipline in-house in between.
Find out where you sit
inside the answer.
A short call is usually enough to know whether GEO is the right next move — or whether the basics need to land first. No deck, no discovery form.