Get quoted where people now ask.
When a customer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity who to hire, the answer cites a few sources and skips everyone else. GEO, also called generative engine optimization or AEO, structures your content so those citations point at you.
What is GEO,exactly?
SEO earns rankings on traditional search. GEO earns citations inside AI answers: the moment when an assistant names your business, links your page, or repeats your explanation as the answer. They are the same goal under two names, being the source the world's search tools trust, and every piece we publish is built for both at once.
The stakes are different, though. A Google results page shows ten options and the customer picks. An AI answer often names one or two, and the customer never sees the rest. Being the cited source is closer to being the only option than to being the top result.
New to how these engines work? Start with what AI engines actually do when someone asks about your business.
How do AI engines decidewho to cite?
Before an assistant answers, it writes its own search queries, often several, and often including brand names the customer never typed. It reads the few pages those queries return and answers from them. Those hidden queries are what your site actually has to rank for, and most agencies never see them.
We record them live. Citrion, the measurement instrument we built for this, captures the real queries inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok, and Copilot, runs every question in fresh sessions because AI answers change between runs, and separates the pages an engine fetched from the pages it cited. Getting fetched and passed over is a different problem from being invisible, and usually a faster one to fix.
The protocol is public: how we measure AI visibility, what Citrion records, and why we run every prompt three times.
What actually movesAI visibility?
Less than the hype suggests, and more than nothing. From our own measurements across audits:
- Content that answers the hidden queries moves citations most. If the engine searches "best accident lawyer Chicago reviews" and you have no page that answers it, you cannot be the answer.
- Clear, quotable writing matters: pages that state facts plainly get lifted into answers; pages that bury them in marketing speak get skipped.
- Normal SEO authority carries over. Engines search the web, so the pages that rank are the pages that get read.
- Schema markup barely moves citations on its own, whatever the LinkedIn posts say. We add it because it is cheap and helps Google, not because it is a GEO silver bullet.
The receipts: what actually moves AI visibility, does schema markup get you cited, and retrieved vs cited, the diagnosis nobody gives you.
How long does GEO taketo show results?
Faster than classic SEO in some cases, because AI engines re-fetch sources often and a page that answers the hidden queries can start appearing in answers within weeks. Slower in others, because citation behavior is noisy and a single appearance is not a trend. We report stability, not screenshots: a finding counts when it repeats across runs.
An honest timeline for your situation comes out of the audit, and we published the general one here: how long GEO takes to show results.
Every plan includes GEO alongside SEO, from a quarterly AI visibility audit on Starter to monthly tracking of you and five competitors on Scale. See pricing for the breakdown, or how it works for the full loop.
Find out what AI sayswhen customers ask about you.
The free audit shows whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and the rest cite you, skip you, or recommend your competitors by name. It also reads every answer that names you and quotes what the assistant says for and against you, because that is what your leads read before they sign.