GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimisation. It's the practice of building your website and content so that generative AI systems — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews — cite your business when their users ask questions you should be the answer to.
It is not SEO. SEO gets your URL onto a Google results page. GEO gets your brand and information into a sentence that an AI writes back to its user.
The mechanics overlap. The outcome doesn't.
A potential customer types: "Best web designers for small businesses in Hertfordshire."
In the SEO world, you wanted to rank near the top of Google. The result was a list of links. The user clicked one.
In the GEO world, your customer asks ChatGPT the same question. ChatGPT doesn't return a list. It returns a paragraph. That paragraph either mentions you or it doesn't. If it does, sometimes it includes a link to your site — a citation. Sometimes it doesn't. Either way, that paragraph has done what a search results page used to do: given the customer their answer.
If you weren't in the paragraph, you didn't exist.
Why this is happening now (and why fast)
Three things have shifted in the last 18 months.
1. Volume. ChatGPT alone is well past 300 million weekly users in 2026. Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Google's own AI Overviews have moved from novelty to default. A meaningful portion of "search" — particularly for advice, comparisons, and "best X for Y" queries — is no longer happening in a search engine.
2. Behaviour. When users get an answer, most of them stop. Studies of AI search consistently show that 60–70% of AI search interactions don't generate a single click-through to any source. The paragraph IS the destination. This is sometimes called zero-click search.
3. Citation infrastructure. AI engines are now showing their sources. ChatGPT cites. Perplexity cites every claim. Google AI Overviews shows linked sources. Claude does too in tool-using mode. So there is a real prize available — being one of the cited sources is now a marketing channel.
What this adds up to: a slice of your future enquiries is now arriving (or not) through AI answers. If you're not optimising for that channel, you're invisible in it. You don't need everyone to be searching this way. You need some of them to be — which is already true.
The hard truth: most websites are illegible to AI
We ran a Searchable audit on sorttheclicks.com in May 2026 — yes, our own site, before we'd done the work we're about to describe. The numbers were instructive.
In other words: AI engines knew who we were. They occasionally name-dropped us. But when they wanted to back up a claim with a source, they almost never reached for us. They reached for ClickSlice, Cleverly, Found, Fat Cow Media, Pentagram — competitors whose sites are structured in ways AI engines have learned to trust.
This gap — the gap between being mentioned and being cited — is what GEO closes. Mentions feel good. Citations move money.
SEO vs GEO: not opposites, but optimising for different things
GEO and SEO share roughly 70% of their underlying tactics. They diverge on what they reward.
- SEO rewards keyword matching, backlinks, page speed, freshness, and the structural cues Google uses to rank a list.
- GEO rewards clear claims, structured data that explicitly answers questions, semantic clarity, and the cues an LLM uses to decide whether a page is quotable source material.
Three things GEO weights that SEO doesn't:
- Structured data that explicitly answers questions. FAQPage schema, Article schema, Service schema with clear
descriptionfields. AI engines literally read these and use them as quotable material. - Definitive language. "GEO is X" gets cited. "GEO can be considered, in some contexts, to involve…" doesn't. AI engines are looking for unambiguous source material.
- An llms.txt file. A structured map of who you are, what you do, and which pages you'd like cited. Ours is here.
What "doing GEO" actually looks like for a small business
There is a lot of vague advice circulating. Here's what the work concretely is. We do all of the following for clients on the GEO retainer.
Audit
Run a tool like Searchable monthly to track which AI engines mention you, on which prompts, alongside which competitors. Without this, you are guessing.
On-page optimisation
Title and meta tags that name your services and audience explicitly. Hero copy that contains your GEO target terms in the first paragraph (AI engines weight the top of the page heavily). Image alt text that describes context, not just content. Service pages with FAQPage schema and concrete pricing.
Schema markup
Organization, LocalBusiness (with address and area served), Person (the founder), Service (with offers and prices), Article (on every blog post), BreadcrumbList (everywhere), FAQPage (everywhere it fits). All with @id cross-links so AI engines can build a coherent picture of your business.
The llms.txt file
A markdown file at yoursite.com/llms.txt that tells LLMs who you are, what you do, your prices, and the URLs you'd like them to cite. AI crawlers look for it.
Topic-cluster content
Service pages alone don't earn citations. Informational articles answering specific questions — "what is GEO?", "should I rebuild my site or update it?", "how much does a website cost?" — that internally link back to your service pages do. AI engines cite answers, not sales pages.
External signals
Directory listings (Clutch, DesignRush, The Manifest, Yell), guest posts, podcast appearances, Reddit and LinkedIn engagement on your topic. AI engines triangulate: a brand mentioned in many places becomes a brand they trust.
That's roughly the work on our Managed and Premium GEO tiers (£600/month and £1,200/month respectively). The £250/month Insights tier gives you the same audit and monthly report; you implement the changes yourself. It's not magic. It's a checklist, applied patiently.
The "I'll just wait" question
A reasonable sceptic asks: why now? Why not wait until this is more established?
Two reasons.
First, citation memory is sticky. Once an AI engine has a stable answer pattern for a query — "best UK web design agencies for small businesses" — and you're not in it, displacing the existing answer takes more effort than getting in early would have. The brands that get there first compound.
Second, the cost of doing it now is low. The cost of fixing the visibility gap in two years, when every UK small business is doing GEO, is structurally higher.
If you are running a UK small business — or you advise one — this is the same opportunity SEO was in 2008. The early movers won. The late movers paid agency rates to catch up.
What to do this week
Three things you can do without hiring anyone:
- Add an llms.txt to your site. Ours is here. Copy the structure. Make yours specific to your business.
- Run a Searchable audit. Free for one project. You'll see which AI engines mention you, on which prompts, and which competitors are eating your share.
- Read your homepage
<title>and meta description. If they don't name your services and your audience explicitly, fix them.
If you'd rather hand the whole thing off — that's what our AI search & GEO service exists for. Three tiers: Insights at £250/month (data and monthly review, you act), Managed at £600/month (we do the work and one article per month), Premium at £1,200/month (we own the topic — two articles, external citations, competitor displacement). No setup fees on any tier.
Either way: do something. The brands that don't will be invisible to a meaningful chunk of their next customers within the next twelve months.
