What is GEO? Generative engine optimisation in plain English
GEO (generative engine optimisation) is making your business one of the sources an AI assistant reads, trusts and repeats when it answers a question. That is the whole idea. Where SEO was about ranking on a page of blue links, GEO is about being quoted in the single answer that increasingly replaces that page.
The shift behind it is simple to observe in your own behaviour. A growing share of buyers no longer type "emergency plumber Chester" into a search box and scan ten results. They ask an assistant a full question ("my boiler is leaking from the bottom, who near Chester can look at it this week?") and get one composed answer. The assistant built that answer from sources it could read and trust. If your business is not one of them, you were never in the running, and no one tells you.
What does this look like for a real customer?
Take a homeowner with a leaking flat roof in Stockport. Five years ago she searched, opened four websites, skimmed them and rang two. Today she is increasingly likely to ask an assistant on her phone: who fixes flat roofs near me, are they reputable, what does this usually involve, what should it roughly cost?
The assistant answers by reading available sources: local firms' websites, review profiles, trade registers, guidance pages. A roofer whose site plainly says "we repair and replace flat roofs across Stockport and south Manchester", explains how they diagnose a leak, and matches its details everywhere else on the web is easy for the machine to recommend with confidence. A competitor whose site is a photo carousel and a phone number gives the machine nothing to work with. The first roofer gets the recommendation. The second never finds out the conversation happened.
That invisibility is the important part. A lost ranking is visible in your analytics. A lost citation is silent.
How does an assistant decide who to mention?
Not by magic and not by advertising. Assistants favour sources that are easy to read, specific, and consistent with everything else they know. In practice that means:
- Pages that answer a question directly, near the top, in plain language.
- Structure a machine can parse: clear headings, short paragraphs, tables, and structured data marked up with schema.org, which is a standard vocabulary for labelling what a page is about.
- Claims that check out, ideally with sources linked.
- A consistent identity: the same business name, services and area on your site, your Google profile, Companies House and your trade body listing. The Google Search documentation makes the same point for search: help the system understand who you are and what the page is, and it can use you; confuse it, and it will use someone else.
Notice that nothing in that list is a trick. It is closer to being a good witness: clear, specific, consistent, verifiable.
What are the first steps for a small business?
| Step | What to do | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1. List real questions | Write down the ten questions customers ask you on the phone before they buy | An hour |
| 2. Answer them on your site | One page or post per question, answer in the first paragraph, plain English | Ongoing, one a week |
| 3. Fix your entity details | Same name, services and towns everywhere: site, Google profile, directories | An afternoon |
| 4. Add structured data | Organisation and Service markup so machines can label you correctly | An afternoon with help |
| 5. Show your evidence | Accreditations, memberships and guarantees named and linked, not implied | An hour |
Step 2 is the engine and the others are the wiring. If you only do one thing, answer real questions in writing where a machine can find the answers.
Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
Mostly no, partly yes. The good habits overlap heavily, and nothing here will hurt your search rankings, so you are not choosing between them. The difference is who consumes the result. SEO optimises for a human scanning a results page; GEO optimises for a machine composing one answer and deciding whom to quote. That favours substance over volume: one page that genuinely settles a question beats twenty thin pages, because the click itself is disappearing as the unit of value.
It also punishes exaggeration. An assistant trying not to repeat unsupported claims will simply route around the site shouting "the North West's number one". Precision has quietly become the best marketing there is.
What should you not do?
Do not buy a miracle. The field is young, measurement is genuinely hard, and anyone selling guaranteed placement in AI answers is describing something they do not control. Do not stuff pages with keywords; the systems reading them are better at spotting filler than any previous generation of technology. And do not wait for certainty, because the firms answering questions clearly today are building a citation footprint their competitors will have to overtake later, which is the same early-mover logic that applies to AI adoption generally.
If you want the deeper version (what to mark up, how to structure pages, what can honestly be measured), we have written a working GEO guide for UK businesses as the follow-on from this one.
The plain English summary is this: machines are now part of your audience. Write so they can quote you, and check that everything they can read about you agrees. That is GEO, and most of your market has not started.