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More and more clients write me the same sentence: «I asked ChatGPT for a recommendation, it gave me three names, and I wasn’t one of them». It’s the clearest sign that search is changing right in front of us. People no longer simply search on Google: they ask the AI, read the answer, and increasingly stop right there. If your business doesn’t show up in that answer, then for that person it’s as if you don’t exist.
Content
This is where GEO comes in.
What GEO is (and why it matters to you)
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: it’s the optimization of your presence for generative engines, the AI systems that produce a written answer instead of a list of links. While SEO aims to make you appear among Google’s results, GEO aims to get you cited inside the answers of ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google’s AI Overviews.
Here are a few figures to grasp the scale of the shift:
- ChatGPT passed 900 million weekly users in early 2026 and processes around 2.5 billion requests a day (TechCrunch data).
- Google’s AI Overviews now reach over one and a half billion users a month and, according to Conductor’s analysis of nearly 22 million queries, went from appearing in ~13% of searches (March 2025) to over 25% in 2026.
Then there’s the figure that changes everything if you own a website: zero-click search. Around 58% of Google searches end without a single click to an external site, and inside Google’s conversational mode (AI Mode) that figure approaches 93%. In other words: the answer becomes the destination. Whoever is cited there earns trust even without a click through to the website.
How AI “decides” who to cite
To optimize, you need to understand the mechanism: AI doesn’t pull names at random, but it doesn’t work like Google’s SERP either.
A generative engine builds its answer in two ways, often combined: from what it learned during training (a snapshot of the web at a given date) and from what it retrieves in real time from the web at the moment it answers (so-called grounding). In both cases the sources are the same pages Google indexes. That’s why a site that’s solid on SEO starts ahead: it’s already on the field.
The difference lies in how the AI reads those pages. The academic study that coined the term GEO, published by researchers from Princeton, Georgia Tech and IIT Delhi at the KDD 2024 conference (full paper on arXiv), makes one decisive point clear: AI extracts passages, not entire pages. It cites the single paragraph that best answers the question. That means a page can be excellent overall, but if the answer to “how much does it cost” or “what’s the difference between X and Y” can’t be isolated in a clear, self-contained block, the AI moves on.
SEO and GEO aren’t in competition
AI learns from and draws on the same content Google indexes. What changes is how you prepare that content, and here there’s one watchword: make every piece of information easy for a machine to extract, as well as easy for a person to read.
- Answer precise questions. A paragraph that clearly explains “how much it costs”, “how it works”, “how often it needs doing” is far more likely to end up inside an AI answer than a slogan.
- Structure everything. Question-shaped headings, lists, FAQs, concrete data. A tidy page is an easy page to cite: a subheading like “How do you structure content for AI?” gets picked up more often than a generic “Our method”.
- Be consistent across sources. AI trusts those it finds named the same way everywhere: website, Google Business Profile, profiles, reviews, mentions on other sites. Consistency of your name, your address and what you do is a signal of reliability.
What really works (and what doesn’t)
In that same Princeton study, researchers tested dozens of interventions across thousands of queries to measure what really increases a source’s visibility in AI answers. The three clear winners:
- Adding statistics and concrete numbers: the single most effective intervention, with visibility gains of up to 40%.
- Citing credible sources: references to research, public data, industry studies.
- Including relevant quotes: statements attributed to authoritative sources.
And what doesn’t work? Good old keyword stuffing, repeating the keyword endlessly: on generative engines its impact is close to zero. The most interesting finding, though, is another one: even pages that rank lower on Google can be cited more than stronger competitors, if their content is clearer and richer in evidence. Classic SEO rewards domain authority; GEO also rewards the verifiable quality of the single answer.
The first concrete steps
If you want to start today, without waiting, here’s the order:
- Start from real questions. Identify the 5 questions your clients ask before buying and create, for each one, a direct answer that can stand on its own as a self-contained block.
- Mind your fact density. Add numbers, examples and concrete cases. A page with a verifiable fact every few lines is far more “citable” than one full of adjectives.
- Sort out your presence off-site. An up-to-date Google Business Profile, reviews, consistent profiles: they all have to tell the same story, because that consistency is where AI gets its trust.
- Measure. Keep an eye on citations over time and on the referrals coming from ChatGPT, Perplexity and the like inside your analytics.
It’s exactly the work I set up when I build a professional SEO strategy: content that works for both Google and AI, without having to redo it twice.
GEO checklist
Keep it within reach every time you work on a piece of content:
- Does it answer a real, specific question the client has?
- Can the answer be isolated in a self-contained paragraph that still makes sense pulled out of context?
- Are there concrete data, numbers or examples to back it up?
- Do I cite credible sources where it matters?
- Are the subheadings clear, ideally question-shaped?
- Is the business name consistent across website, Google and profiles?
- Have I tested the question on at least one generative engine to see who gets cited?
GEO: getting found by ChatGPT
The fundamentals stay the same as always: clear, authoritative, well-structured content, but with new attention to how a machine reads and reuses that information.
If you want to understand how you stand with AI and what to improve, get in touch: we’ll start from an honest look at your situation, with no promises that no one can keep.
