Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO): the next generation of SEO?

Until a few years ago, it was almost self-evident: if you wanted to be found online, you optimised your website for Google. SEO and SEA determined whether you were visible, whether you got traffic and, ultimately, whether you could attract new customers.

This still works very well, but at the same time, the online search behaviour of both businesses and consumers is changing rapidly. Questions are no longer always asked directly to Google, but increasingly to AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude or Perplexity. These types of tools provide you with a summary or formulate an immediate answer, often even including brand or product recommendations.

Imagine someone asking ChatGPT: ‘What is the best accounting firm in the Valkenswaard region?’ You will then receive a list of names. If your company is not listed as an accounting firm in that region, you have already lost. And that’s before the potential customer has even seen a single search result in Google.

Welcome to the world of Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO).

Generative Engine Optimisation, also known as AI SEO, LLM SEO or Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), is the art of making your business so visible that AI bots and search assistants actively recommend your brand in answers.

It goes hand in hand with SEO, but with slightly different rules. Whereas SEO revolves around keywords, technical optimisation and backlinks, GEO revolves around being present in the data sources and patterns from which AI models compile their answers. SEO is rugby, GEO is American football. They are similar, but they work slightly differently.

In other words: SEO ensures that Google finds you, GEO ensures that AI recommends you.

AI assistants work in roughly three ways when making recommendations:

1. The search engine (SEO remains the basis)

Many AI tools (such as ChatGPT with search function or Perplexity) retrieve information live from search engines such as Bing or Google. SEO therefore remains very important. If you do not rank well in search engines, you will often not appear in AI responses.

2. AI Overview (Google’s own summaries)

You have undoubtedly seen AI Overviews (AIO) in Google before: summaries with links. It is striking that these summaries in Google mention more brands on average (6 per search query) than ChatGPT (2.4 brands on average). This offers opportunities, but at the same time requires specific optimisation. Google’s AI selects different sources than the classic search results.

3. LLM training data (what AI ‘knows’)

Sometimes AI does not perform a new search on the spot, but retrieves an answer directly from the knowledge trained in the model. Factors such as the following play a role here:

• Frequency: how often your brand is mentioned on the internet (we also refer to this as citations).
• Prominence: how important those mentions are (main source or merely a footnote).
• Context: how strongly your brand is associated with a particular topic.

If your brand appears frequently and positively in reliable contexts (articles, reviews, discussions, news), there is a greater chance that AI will mention you spontaneously. Qualitative link building and digital PR therefore have a direct influence on your visibility in AI tools.

At Boost Online, we don’t believe in gimmicks, but in sustainable strategies. That’s why we’ve reduced our GEO approach to a number of core elements.

1. Actively build authority

AI draws a lot of information from sources it trusts: large websites, reliable blogs, (regional) news. Make sure your brand is mentioned in articles on websites with real traffic that are relevant to your business. A single mention in an influential article can influence dozens of AI responses.

2. Create AI-friendly content

AI likes content that provides immediate answers to questions, problems or needs and is also up to date. It is therefore important to actively add content to your website, but also to take AI preferences into account. Consider:

• Comparison pages.
• Guides with specific information to aid decision-making (such as a buying guide).
• FAQ elements where you answer potential questions directly.
• Up-to-date and unique information; create content that adds value to the web and is not a reproduction of existing information.

3. Ensure your website is accessible and clear

If your website is not technically sound, you may unknowingly make it difficult for AI crawlers to fully map or understand your website. That is why we always check whether the foundation (your website technology) is in order as a first step.

4. Strengthen your brand context

AI models recognise brands that are frequently and consistently linked to specific themes. Through digital PR, collaborations and content marketing, we ensure that your brand appears more often in the right contexts. This allows AI to link your company to search queries that are relevant to you.

The rise of GEO is perhaps the biggest change in online findability since the advent of Google itself. Those who invest now can stay ahead of their competitors for years to come. But if you fall behind, you won’t be mentioned in AI responses and will therefore be out of sight of potential customers.

The great thing is that much of the approach to GEO builds on existing SEO knowledge and best practices. If you are already on the right track with this, you don’t necessarily need a new strategy for GEO, but simply expand your efforts to a new playing field.