If you’ve heard people mention GEO lately and assumed it was a typo for SEO, you’re not daft, you’re just slightly behind a curve that’s moved fast. GEO stands for generative engine optimisation, and it’s quickly becoming just as important as traditional SEO, if not more so for some businesses.
Put simply, GEO is about making sure your business gets mentioned, recommended, and represented accurately when people ask AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity a question, rather than typing it into Google. And that’s happening a lot more than most business owners realise.
Why AI search optimisation is different to normal SEO
Traditional SEO is largely about ranking a page. You optimise your content, build a few links, sort your technical setup, and hope Google puts you on page one. AI search optimisation works differently. These tools aren’t ranking ten blue links, they’re reading across the web, pulling information from multiple sources, and generating a single answer. If your site isn’t structured in a way that’s easy for an AI model to understand and trust, you simply don’t get mentioned at all. There’s no page two to fall back on.
What actually affects whether you show up
A few things seem to matter a lot here. Clear, well-structured content that answers real questions directly, rather than padding things out for the sake of word count. Proper schema markup so search engines and AI crawlers can understand exactly what your business does and who it serves. Consistency across the web, so your name, services and location match up wherever you’re mentioned. And increasingly, a specific file called llms.txt, which gives AI models a clean, curated summary of your site rather than leaving them to guess.
Geo SEO businesses shouldn’t ignore
For agencies and businesses working across the UK, there’s a local layer to this too. Geo SEO, getting found for location-specific searches, still matters just as much when AI is doing the searching. If someone asks an AI tool to recommend a service in Leeds or Yorkshire, you want your business showing up in that answer, not just in a Google map pack three scrolls down.
Why this matters now, not eventually
A lot of businesses are treating this like something to worry about later. That’s a mistake. AI search tools are already answering millions of questions a day that would once have gone through Google, and the businesses getting mentioned right now are the ones who’ve already put the groundwork in. Waiting means playing catch up once everyone else has sorted their structured data, their llms.txt files, and their schema.
We’ve been working through this properly for our own site and for clients, adding structured data, curating llms.txt files, and making sure our content actually answers the questions people are asking. It’s not a bolt-on, it’s becoming part of how a website needs to work full stop.
