GEO optimisation makes your content citable for AI models, so ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity name your brand instead of your competitor's. It explains a frustrating situation many brands recognise: strong content, a tidy website, a solid Google position, and yet a different name comes back when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation. This article gives the full step-by-step plan: what demonstrably works, which popular tactic wastes your time, and how to start in five steps.
What is GEO optimisation?
GEO optimisation is the work that makes your content and website citable for generative AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity, so that your brand is named in the answer instead of ranking in a list of links. GEO stands for Generative Engine Optimization. It works on three layers at once: your content (is it citable?), your technical setup (can AI read your site?) and your authority (does AI trust you as a source?). Seen from the marketing mix, the same work is covered in GEO marketing.
Why GEO optimisation matters now
GEO optimisation matters because the AI answer increasingly replaces the click. The Pew Research Center (July 2025) saw US users click on a search result in only 8% of cases when an AI summary appears, versus 15% without one, and SparkToro measured that 68% of US Google searches ended without a click between January and April 2026. These are US figures, so treat them as indicative for other markets; the background is in what GEO is.
Bain & Company (research published in February 2025) arrives at roughly 60% of searches ending zero-click, based on a consumer survey. At the same time, the audience pulling answers from AI keeps growing. In October 2025 ChatGPT counted more than 800 million weekly users, and in July 2025 Google AI Overviews reached 2 billion monthly users across more than 200 countries. Whoever appears in those answers stays in view. Whoever is missing becomes invisible, even with a strong Google position. Veesie measures the AI visibility of your brand for marketers and agencies, so you see the effect of every round of GEO optimisation instead of having to guess at it.
What works for GEO optimisation?
The strongest levers are enriching your content with quotations, statistics and source citations. That comes from the GEO study by Princeton, IIT Delhi and others, accepted at the scientific conference KDD 2024. The researchers tested which changes raise visibility in generative answers most:
In the test, the three strongest tactics (citing sources, adding quotations and adding statistics) raised a source's visibility by 30 to 40% relative, the best by about 41%, within five documents selected in advance. That is not a promise for your own site, and a survey of 45 GEO studies found no technique with a stable, longitudinal, cross-platform causal effect on organic discoverability or on downstream clicks and conversions. The caveats are worked out in 8 GEO myths. Keyword repetition was among the least effective approaches, and facts, numbers and sources weigh the most.
In practice that means a small rewrite per paragraph. Replace a vague opening line like "GEO is very important for companies these days" with a factual variant that carries a number and a source: "68% of US Google searches ended without a click between January and April 2026 (SparkToro)." The first sentence is interchangeable with any competitor in the eyes of an AI model. The second is a self-contained, citable fact. Write each section so the opening sentence can stand on its own as an answer, then build the context around it. The full step-by-step plan with examples is in 8 tips to improve your GEO Score.
What GEO optimisation is not
GEO optimisation is not schema markup and not a technical trick. That matters, because a lot of advice sells structured data as the button that pushes you into an AI answer. A difference-in-differences study by Ahrefs (2026) of 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD schema found no meaningful rise in AI citations on any platform, and a significant 4.6% drop in Google AI Overviews.
That does not make schema worthless. It makes your page machine-readable and helps with classic SEO, and SEO for AI covers how your existing SEO carries over. But as a citation lever for GEO optimisation, it does not work. The energy you put into peripheral files pays off more in citable content and in a site AI can read. On the balance between SEO and GEO, Lily Ray of Amsive argues in A reflection on SEO and AI search (January 2026) that AEO and GEO do not replace or abandon SEO, they add a new system for competing for, capturing and measuring visibility on AI platforms.
How do you start with GEO optimisation?
GEO optimisation does not start with the newest tactic, but with a baseline measurement. A workable order in five steps:
The second step is the one most often skipped, and it is exactly where brands lose visibility. A wrongly blocked AI crawler or content that only loads with JavaScript renders all your content work useless: an AI that cannot reach your site cannot cite it either. How specifically ChatGPT reads your site is covered in ChatGPT SEO, and how to appear in AI chatbots shows how the other engines differ. For Google's AI summaries specifically, see Google AI Overviews.
Veesie tracks weekly whether your GEO optimisation is landing, across up to five AI sources (three on Starter and in the free trial). The free trial gives you the baseline to test your changes against.
How do you measure the result of GEO optimisation?
You measure GEO optimisation by repeatedly asking AI models the same relevant questions and counting how often your brand is named. A single one-off check says little, because AI answers are non-deterministic: the same question gives a different answer each time. So you work with a fixed question set across multiple runs, until the noise drops away and only the trend is left.
Three metrics together give the picture: mention rate (are you named), share of voice (how you compare to competitors) and sentiment (how you are named). Veesie's GEO Score runs from 0 to 100 and combines mention rate, sentiment, source coverage and position, based on ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. From the Plus plan, Claude and Gemini are measured as well, across five AI sources in total. How your sector stands on average is shown in the GEO benchmark by sector.
Conclusion: GEO optimisation is measuring and adjusting
GEO optimisation is not a one-off project and not a technical trick, it is an ongoing process of measuring, writing and adjusting. The rules differ from SEO: you do not win with the highest position, but with the most citable and authoritative content, on a site AI can read. Schema and keyword repetition are not part of it, numbers, sources and niche authority are.
So start with your baseline and test every change against the evolution of your numbers. Veesie makes that GEO optimisation concrete for marketers and agencies, so you steer on data instead of gut feeling. Not sure yet? Compare the pricing and features first.