Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Services

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of getting AI systems such as ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot to cite or recommend your business when someone asks a question. Instead of earning a blue link on a results page, you earn a mention inside the answer itself, sometimes with a source link, sometimes with none at all. Keyword Planner shows real demand for the term: 4,400 searches a month in the US, 590 in Canada. The work overlaps with SEO (a crawlable, fast, well-structured site still matters) but adds new layers: AI crawler access, llms.txt, claim-dense writing, and testing actual AI answers rather than just checking rankings.

Answer engine optimization is the part of GEO focused on direct questions: "what is," "how much does X cost," "who is the best Y near me." AEO pages lead with a short, direct answer near the top of the page, because research from Growth Memo on 1.2 million AI answers found 44% of citations pull from the first 30% of a page. If the real answer is buried under three paragraphs of story, most AI models skip past it before they ever reach it. People also search this as "aeo seo" or "aeo agency," roughly 720 to 1,000 searches a month combined across the US.

Yes, though they share a foundation. Traditional SEO optimizes for ranking position and clicks; GEO optimizes for being quoted inside an AI answer, which can happen with zero click to your site. Ahrefs found only 6% to 8% overlap between ChatGPT citations and Google top-10 results for the same queries, so a page that ranks on Google can still get skipped by ChatGPT, and a page on page two of Google can still get quoted by name. Our own 201-page study found claim density (hard numbers and percentages) predicted AI citations far better than word count, FAQ schema, or tables, which is the opposite of most classic SEO advice.

Yes. GEO sits on top of SEO, not instead of it. ChatGPT web search leans heavily on Bing data (Seer Interactive found 87% of SearchGPT citations matched Bing's own top 20 results for the same query), so a page Bing cannot find or trust rarely gets cited, no matter how well it is written for AI. Google Search still drives the majority of most businesses' organic traffic today, including ours (it is still our #1 source, ahead of ChatGPT at #3). Think of GEO as a second distribution channel riding on the same technical and content foundation SEO already needs.

Start by confirming OAI-SearchBot and ChatGPT-User can actually fetch your pages (a server-level block can return a 429 even when robots.txt allows the bot). Then make sure Bing has indexed your site, since ChatGPT search runs on Bing's index. Add an llms.txt file, ship FAQ and LocalBusiness schema that renders in the static HTML, and rewrite your top pages to carry real numbers instead of vague claims. Our own 201-page analysis found cited pages carried a median of 50 dollar figures and 14 percentages, versus 16 and 7 on pages that never got cited. Then test the actual question your buyers would ask, in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, and fix whatever is missing from the answer.

There is no fixed timeline, but our own data gives a reference point: ChatGPT referrals to our site grew from 30 visits in August 2026 to 68 in October 2026, more than doubling in two months once the technical and content fixes were live. AI answers can also shift within days of a fresh crawl and reindex, faster than a typical Google ranking move, because there is no multi-week trust-building period the way there can be with a brand-new domain in organic search. The slower part is usually the content and schema work itself, which we treat the same as any SEO build: weeks, not a single afternoon.

llms.txt is a plain-text file at the root of your domain that tells an AI crawler what your business does and links to your most important pages, similar in spirit to a sitemap but written for a language model instead of a search index. It will not single-handedly get you cited (claim density and Bing indexing matter more), but it removes one small barrier between an AI crawler and an accurate summary of your business, and it takes under an hour to ship once your key pages are picked. We add one for every GEO client as a standard first step, alongside the AI crawler access check.