GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation

The shift

For twenty years, search meant a ranked list of ten blue links, and the game was SEO: climb the list. Generative engines change the surface. When someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews a question, they receive one synthesised answer built from a handful of cited sources. Ten links collapse into one paragraph. GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation — is the practice of becoming one of the sources that answer is built from.

The stakes are concrete. As buyers move to AI assistants for research, the moment of intent shifts inside the engine. When it names three sources and yours is absent, you are invisible at the exact point of decision — not ranked tenth, simply uncited.

QUERY  "best <category> for <use-case>"
────────────────────────────────────────────
UN-OPTIMISED   cited in   ▉ 1 / 10 answers
GEO-OPTIMISED  cited in   ▉▉▉▉▉▉▉ 7 / 10
────────────────────────────────────────────
LEVERS  structure · citations · entities ·
        freshness · consensus

The five levers

• 01Structure — write in extractable units. Question-led headings, definitions up top, short declarative sentences. Engines lift what they parse cleanly.
• 02Citations — earn mentions on sources engines already trust. References from high-authority domains raise the odds the engine treats you as a source.
• 03Entities — make the machine understand who you are. Consistent naming, structured data (Organisation, Product, FAQ schema), and a clear entity graph across the web.
• 04Freshness — recency wins. Engines favour recently updated, dated material for fast-moving topics. Version and date your reference pages.
• 05Consensus — engines synthesise agreement. When independent sources describe your category the same way, the engine repeats that framing. Shape the consensus early.

In the wild

Watch how Notion, HubSpot, and Nike already write for machines: definition-first pages, heavy structured data, dated updates, and a dense internal link graph. Notion's help centre is engineered to be quoted — each article opens with a plain-language definition an engine can lift verbatim. That is GEO in practice, whether or not they name it.