GEO explained What Is GEO? A Practical Guide to Generative Engine Optimisation

By Pixie Digital Creatives · 2026-11-01 · 2 min read

Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of making a business easy for AI tools to find, understand and cite. When someone asks ChatGPT Search, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity or Copilot for a recommendation, those tools write an answer from the information they can access. GEO makes sure accurate information about your business is part of that picture.

How AI tools find information

AI search tools use crawlers, just as search engines do. Some crawlers fetch pages to answer a question right now and link to their sources (for example OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot and Claude-SearchBot). Others collect pages to train future models (for example GPTBot and ClaudeBot). Your robots.txt file can allow or block each group separately.

Many of these crawlers do not run JavaScript. If your website only shows its text after JavaScript loads, they may see an almost empty page, even though visitors and Google see everything.

A GEO checklist for your website

1. Make sure your main content is in the HTML, readable without JavaScript.
2. Decide your crawler policy and write it in robots.txt: search crawlers and training crawlers as separate groups.
3. Keep brand facts identical everywhere: business name, website, phone, email and social profiles.
4. Add structured data: Organization for the business, Service for each service, Article for guides and BreadcrumbList for navigation.
5. Publish citable content: clear definitions, honest comparisons, detailed service pages and real case studies.
6. Answer real questions in plain language, with the short answer first.
7. Optionally add an llms.txt file: a plain-text summary of your site that some AI tools may read. It is not a ranking requirement.

What to avoid

• Invented reviews, statistics, awards or client names: AI tools and search engines compare sources, and false claims damage trust.
• Stuffing pages with keywords: write for people, using the words they use.
• Hiding text that visitors cannot see: the content crawlers read should match what people read.

How to measure GEO

There is no single GEO ranking report. A practical approach is to keep a list of the questions your customers ask, put them to the main AI tools every month, and record whether your brand appears and whether the description is accurate.

Your analytics can also show visits that arrive from AI tools, such as chatgpt.com or perplexity.ai, and Google Search Console includes clicks and impressions from AI features in its web search data.

Can GEO guarantee that AI tools recommend you?

No. AI tools decide what they include, and those decisions change as the tools evolve. GEO improves the odds by making accurate, useful information about your business easy to find, understand and quote.