Generative engine optimization: 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.
Free. We show you which assistants name you today, and which name your rivals.
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?
An assistant does not answer from memory. It runs a short retrieval loop first, and every step of it is a place you can win or lose:
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It writes its own queries
Often several, and often including brand names the customer never typed. These hidden queries, not the question you were asked, are what your pages actually have to rank for.
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It fetches a handful of pages
Only the few results those queries surface. If your crawler access is blocked or your page never ranks for the query it wrote, the loop ends here for you.
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It cites a smaller handful
Fetched and passed over is a different problem from invisible, and usually a faster one to fix. We log the two separately for exactly that reason.
We record all three steps live. Citrion, the measurement instrument we built for this, captures the real queries inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Grok and Copilot, and runs every question in fresh sessions because AI answers change between runs. Google AI Overviews is the sixth engine we audit, measured where we can observe it and labelled modeled where we cannot.
The protocol is public: how we measure AI visibility, what Citrion records, and why we never ask just once.
What actually movesAI visibility?
Less than the hype suggests, and more than nothing. From our own measurements across audits:
Moves citations
- Content that answers the hidden queries. 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. Pages that state facts plainly get lifted into answers. Pages that bury them in marketing speak get skipped.
- Normal SEO authority. Engines search the web, so the pages that rank are the pages that get read.
Barely moves citations
- Schema markup 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.
- An llms.txt file. We have not seen assistants fetch it. It costs nothing to add, so we add it, and we do not bill it as strategy.
- A single good answer in one run. Citation behavior is noisy. One appearance is not a trend, which is why nothing counts until it repeats across runs.
The receipts: what actually moves AI visibility, does schema markup get you cited, and retrieved vs cited, the diagnosis nobody gives you.
Want to know which of these your site is already missing?
See if AI recommends meHow 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.
Weighing us against other shops? We scored 23 GEO agencies, and ourselves, on four disclosures anyone can check: best GEO agencies, ranked on what they disclose.
Find out what AI sayswhen customers ask about you.
The free AI visibility 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.