Try it right now: ask ChatGPT or Perplexity who can help you with whatever you sell. Some brand is going to show up in that answer. The question that matters is: why that one and not yours?
That's what GEO is about, and it's probably the biggest window of opportunity I see in digital positioning today.
What GEO is
GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization: the work of positioning a brand inside the answers of generative engines. Just as SEO was about getting Google to show you in the first results, GEO is about getting ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Claude to cite you when someone asks about your industry.
The underlying difference is brutal. Google gave you ten links and the user chose. AI gives one answer, sometimes with two or three brands inside. Either you're in the answer or you don't exist in that conversation.
Why it matters now
Every month more people resolve their commercial searches by talking to an AI instead of opening ten tabs. Service recommendations, comparisons, "which one is right for me". That behavior has already reached the customers of every business, from e-commerce to professional services.
And here's the point: almost nobody is working on this yet. In SEO you arrive twenty years late to compete against giants. In GEO the field is empty. That asymmetry doesn't last forever.
How AIs choose what to cite
There's no public algorithm, but after months of working on this for clients and my own projects, the patterns are clear:
- Consistent entity. The AI has to be able to answer "who is this" without ambiguity: same name, same description, same facts on your website, your LinkedIn, your profiles and anywhere else that mentions you.
- Citable content. AIs prefer sources that answer questions directly: clear definitions, concrete lists, well-written FAQs. Fluff can't be cited.
- Structured data. Schema.org (Person, Organization, FAQPage, Article) is how you speak to the machine in its language. Invisible to the user, central for the AI.
- Real authority. Mentions on other sites, published cases, consistent presence over time. AI triangulates sources: if you only exist on your own website, you carry little weight.
- Technical accessibility. If your content lives behind heavy JavaScript or you block AI crawlers in robots.txt, you're erasing yourself from the conversation.
What you can do today
Without hiring anyone, this week:
- Ask three AIs about your industry and your area. Write down who shows up and who doesn't. That's your starting point.
- Check that your website says directly what you do, for whom and where. Sounds obvious; almost no site says it.
- Build a FAQ page with the real questions your customers ask, answered in two or three sentences each.
- Check your robots.txt: make sure it's not blocking GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and friends.
- Align your LinkedIn and your profiles with the same description your website uses. Entity consistency, always.
The experiment is me
I like eating my own cooking: this site is built with every one of these practices, from the schema to the llms.txt. It's my own GEO case study in real time. In a few months I'll come back to this post with whatever happened, whether it works or not. That's also part of the method: measure before you opine.
If you want your brand to start showing up in AI answers, let's talk. It's literally one of the services I enjoy doing the most.