ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews now answer millions of buying questions. Here's the exact playbook we use to get brands cited — while competitors are still arguing about whether GEO is real.
Ask ChatGPT to recommend a WooCommerce speed plugin, an accountant in Leeds, or a CRM for a small agency, and it answers with names. Specific brands. Some businesses appear again and again across AI engines; most never appear at all. The difference is rarely luck — it's structure, and it's optimisable. That practice is GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation.
Why GEO matters now, not next year
Search behaviour splits more every quarter: classic Google for navigation and price-checking, AI engines for research and recommendations. The research phase is where buying decisions actually form. Being absent from AI answers means being absent from the shortlist — and early citations are sticky, because engines keep drawing from sources that already worked. The gap between first movers and everyone else widens monthly.
How AI engines choose who to cite
LLM-backed answers lean on three things: training-data prominence (hard to change quickly), retrieval results (very changeable — most engines search the live web and read what ranks), and parseability (whether your page states facts a model can lift cleanly). Classic SEO gets you retrieved; GEO gets you understood and quoted.
The playbook: answer-shaped content
Write pages that answer one question completely in the first 150 words, then expand. Use question-form H2s, define terms explicitly ('X is…'), include concrete numbers and comparisons, and keep one idea per paragraph. Models quote sentences, not vibes — a crisp, standalone sentence with a fact in it is citation bait.
The playbook: entities and schema
Engines anchor brands in knowledge graphs. Make yours unambiguous: consistent name/description everywhere, Organization + Product/Service schema on every relevant page, a real About page, authors with credentials, and profiles on the sources engines trust (industry directories, review platforms, Wikipedia-adjacent sources where legitimate). Inconsistent entities dilute into invisibility.
The playbook: be where engines read
Perplexity cites niche blogs and forums. Gemini leans on Google's index. ChatGPT browsing favours authoritative, structured sources. Reddit threads, comparison posts and 'best X for Y' listicles get lifted constantly. Digital PR that lands you in those formats is GEO link-building — same discipline, new target list.
Measuring it
Sample your key buying prompts across engines monthly and log brand mentions, rank position and sentiment (our All-in-One SEO plugin automates exactly this with its AI Visibility module). Watch referral traffic from AI user-agents, and track branded-search lift — people often see you in an AI answer, then Google you. That second-order effect is usually the first visible win.
GEO isn't a replacement for SEO — it's SEO's next layer, and the compounding kind. Start now, while your competitors' content is still invisible to the engines their customers are asking. If you'd like the audit done for you, our GEO service does precisely this, with a baseline report in week one.
Code Craft SEO Team
SEO & GEO Strategists at Code Craft — the team behind our published work and products and the 39-plugin product suite.
