GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation)
GEO is the discipline of structuring content so generative AI tools can find, understand and confidently quote your business as the answer.
Search is splitting into two channels
Traditional SEO optimises for ranking in a list of blue links. Increasingly, a growing share of research and purchase-decision searches happen inside generative AI tools — ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude — which read across the web and generate a single synthesised answer, often citing (or simply drawing from) a handful of sources.
GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is the practice of structuring your content so it's genuinely useful raw material for that process: clear, factual, well-structured answers to real questions, rather than vague marketing copy that a language model has nothing concrete to extract or quote.
What actually makes content AI-quotable
AI systems favour content that gives a direct, unambiguous answer close to the question being asked, backed by specifics rather than generalities. 'We offer competitive pricing' is unquotable — it says nothing. 'A focused brochure site design starts from £1,800' is quotable — it's a specific, checkable fact a model can confidently repeat.
This is why every UNIT10 service and FAQ page is written the way it is: direct questions, direct answers, specific numbers and scope where we can honestly give them, and structured data (FAQPage, Service schema) that makes the structure explicit rather than implied.
GEO and AEO are closely related, not identical
GEO is about being cited or drawn on by generative AI tools generating novel answers. AEO (see our AEO service) is about being the direct answer to a specific question — in a featured snippet, a voice search response, or an AI Overview. They overlap heavily in practice: clear, well-structured, genuinely useful answer content serves both.
Frequently asked questions
What is GEO?
GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the practice of structuring website content so that generative AI tools — ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — can accurately find, understand and cite it when generating answers to relevant questions, in the same way traditional SEO optimises for ranking in search engine results pages.
How does AI search actually work?
Generative AI search tools typically retrieve relevant content from across the web (or from their training data) related to a query, then generate a synthesised natural-language answer, sometimes with citations to specific sources. Content that's clear, factual and directly structured around real questions is far more likely to be accurately retrieved and quoted than vague or poorly structured content.
Can you actually measure GEO performance?
It's a newer, less mature measurement discipline than traditional SEO, but it's measurable — by directly testing relevant queries across major AI tools and tracking whether and how your business is referenced, alongside monitoring referral traffic increasingly showing up from AI platforms.