GEO: how to get your brand recommended by AI

Search did not disappear. It split. Some of your customers still type a query into Google and scan the blue links. A fast-growing share now ask an AI assistant a question and read one synthesised answer, with only a handful of brands named inside it. If your brand is not in that answer, you are invisible to those people. Earning a place there is what we call Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO.

SEO gets you ranked. GEO gets you quoted.

Classic SEO competes for a position on a results page. GEO competes for a sentence inside an answer that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews write on the fly. The incentives are different. Ranking rewards keywords and backlinks. Being quoted rewards clarity, structure and trust: content a model can lift cleanly and attribute with confidence.

What actually moves the needle

• Answer the question in the first two lines. Models extract the most direct statement they can find. Bury your point and you lose the citation.
• Structure for machines. Clear headings, short paragraphs, FAQ blocks and schema markup make a page easy to parse and easy to quote.
• Publish primary facts. Original data, named examples and specific numbers get cited far more often than generic copy any site could have written.
• Be readable by the crawlers. Welcome the AI bots in robots.txt and give them a clean summary of who you are. An llms.txt file is a simple, high-leverage start.

How we approach it

For our clients we treat the AI answer as a distribution channel with its own rules, the same way we treat out-of-home or dark social. We write the canonical version of every claim a brand wants associated with it, structure the site so a model can read it without guessing, and publish the facts and FAQs that make the brand the obvious thing to cite. Then we measure which questions surface the brand and which still hand the sentence to a competitor.

Search is becoming a conversation. The brands that win the next few years are the ones an AI recommends out loud, by name. That is something you can build for, and the best time to start is before your category does.