What is GEO? Generative engine optimisation in plain English
GEO means generative engine optimisation: making sure ChatGPT and Gemini can find your business and name it when someone asks. What it is, where the term came from, and what it isn't.
GEO stands for generative engine optimisation. It is the work of making sure AI assistants can find your business, understand what you do, and name you when someone asks them for a recommendation.
That is the whole definition. Everything else is detail.
Why a new acronym turned up
For about twenty-five years, being found online meant appearing in a list. Somebody typed a question, Google returned ten results, and your job was to be near the top of them. An entire industry grew up around that one problem.
Then assistants started answering the question instead of listing places to find the answer. Ask ChatGPT who to call about a blocked drain in Penrith and you do not get ten links. You get a short paragraph naming two or three businesses.
That is a different problem. Not a harder one, necessarily, but a different one, and it needed a name. Several people named it at once, which is why you will see all of these:
- GEO, generative engine optimisation
- AEO, answer engine optimisation
- AI search optimisation
- LLM SEO
- AI visibility
They mean the same thing. None of them has won yet. If someone tells you their acronym is the correct one and the others are wrong, they are selling you something.
What actually changes
One thing, and it is worth sitting with, because everything else follows from it.
A list has room for you at number seven. An answer does not.
On Google, being seventh is not great, but it is a page-one result and it earns work. In an AI answer there is no seventh place. There are two or three names and then there is everyone else. There is no page two to be found on.
That is the entire strategic difference. It is not that the techniques are exotic. It is that the prize is narrower.
What GEO is not
It is not a replacement for SEO. For a local Australian business, Google still sends the overwhelming majority of the traffic. That is not close. Anyone telling you to move your budget out of SEO and into GEO is either not looking at the numbers or hoping you won’t.
It is not a secret set of techniques. Most of what makes a business quotable by an AI is what makes it findable on Google: a fast, clearly structured site, a page for each thing you do, consistent business details, schema markup, real reviews. If someone is pitching a proprietary GEO framework, ask them which parts are not just competent SEO.
It is not a $3,000-a-month product. Australian agencies are quoting between $2,000 and $4,000 a month for GEO as a standalone service, and I have seen a published package starting at $3,200 a month with a six-month minimum. That is hard to defend when most of the work overlaps with SEO you should be doing anyway.
It is not measurable the way rankings are. There is no equivalent of a rank tracker with a tidy number. You measure it by asking the AI the question and recording what it says. That is less satisfying and considerably more honest.
How big is this really, in Australia?
Smaller than the hype, bigger than nothing.
When I ran the numbers in August 2026, “generative engine optimisation” was getting about 260 searches a month across Australia. “AI search visibility” was getting about 20. For comparison, “seo consultant” gets 1,600.
More telling: of the 396 AI-search terms I checked, only 9 returned a competitive difficulty score at all. The tool that calculates difficulty does it from the top ten organic results, so when it comes back empty it means the results themselves are thin and unsettled. The field has not formed yet.
But search volume for the term is not the same as the behaviour. Very few people search for “generative engine optimisation”. Rather more of them are quietly asking ChatGPT which plumber to call, and that share only moves one way.
So what should you actually do?
If you are a local business, in order:
- Fix your ordinary SEO first. It is where the traffic is, and roughly four fifths of the GEO work comes free with it.
- Make sure your details agree everywhere. Same business name, same address, same phone, on your site and every directory. Models cross-check, and disagreement makes you unusable.
- Write pages that answer real questions, in the words customers use. If they say “blocked drain” and your site says “drainage solutions”, you lose to the business that wrote it plainly.
- Check whether it worked. Open ChatGPT and Gemini, type the question a customer would type, and write down who gets named. Do it again next month.
Step four is free and most businesses have never done it once.
The honest summary
GEO is real, it is worth doing, and it is mostly good SEO with a narrower prize and a different way of measuring. Do it as part of your normal search work. Do not pay a premium for the acronym.
If you want the mechanics of how an assistant picks who to name, I have written that up separately in how AI decides which businesses to recommend, and there are diagrams for the whole thing on the GEO explainer page.