Generative engine optimization
Getting named and cited in AI answers, measured per model and per competitor.
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the practice of optimising your website and your brand so that AI search engines such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews name you and cite your pages in their answers. Where SEO fights for a position in a list, GEO fights for a place inside the answer itself.
We do this work every day, for clients and for ourselves. With tools like Promptwatch we track how often AI models mention a brand, which domains they cite and how that shifts month by month. Those measurements steer everything we build and write.
What exactly is GEO?
A generative engine does not return ten blue links; it writes an answer and picks a handful of sources to build it. GEO makes sure your brand and your pages belong to that handful. The playing field is smaller than a results page and the winners take more of it: in the market of Dakwerken Roofit, three domains together occupy roughly one in five AI answers.
That concentration is the biggest lesson from our measurements: AI answers do not spread visibility evenly, they pile it onto a small leading group. Start early and you build a head start that latecomers have to win back answer by answer.
How GEO differs from SEO
SEO optimises pages for keywords and measures positions. GEO optimises your brand for questions and measures your share of answers: the percentage of relevant AI answers in which you get named or cited. That demands different writing. A page can rank without answering the question in its first paragraph; a page that gets cited cannot.
The engineering shifts too. AI crawlers such as GPTBot read less patiently than Googlebot, so structure and structured data carry more weight. And your brand has to hold up as an entity: the same name, the same description and the same facts across your site, your profiles and the sources that write about you. The foundation overlaps with SEO; the yardstick does not.
Wondering what this means for your site?
Ask usHow we make your brand citable: the playbook
Becoming citable for AI search engines takes five steps with us, always in this order.
- First measurement: per AI model we measure how often your brand gets named, benchmarked against your competitors
- Engineering: admit AI crawlers, add structured data and publish an llms.txt
- Content: one page per customer question, answering it in the first paragraph
- Authority: build consistent brand mentions on the sources AI models trust
- Measurement: track your share of answers and your citations per domain monthly, and adjust
This playbook is part of our AI search and organic growth engagement, in which Google rankings and AI visibility are built up together.
What does GEO deliver?
For Dakwerken Roofit this work produced the top spot in AI search: number one on Perplexity, ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews simultaneously, nearly four times more visible than the runner-up, and twenty percent more enquiries per week. Enquiries, not just mentions: one in fifteen visitors requests a quote.
It works without a big brand too. Uitgeverij Wilde Haren, a two-person publisher, holds 27 percent visibility in Google AI Overviews and beats the largest booksellers in the Netherlands in AI answers about children's books. Their Google traffic doubled over the same period.
What does generative engine optimization cost?
The price depends on your starting position in the measurement, the breadth of the question space you want to occupy and the strength of the domains currently taking the answers. A brand that already gets mentioned and needs to expand calls for a different programme than a brand still at zero in the measurement.
We work with a fixed monthly fee and no lock-in: if it is not working, you can leave any month. After an initial conversation we dig into your situation, and you receive a proposal with a concrete number and an honest estimate of what is achievable in your market.
Frequently asked questions
No. GEO is the layer on top of SEO, not a replacement. A healthy technical foundation and strong content help both channels; only the yardstick and part of the writing differ. Drop SEO for GEO and you undermine the very sources AI models lean on.
Every month we ask AI models the questions your customers actually ask and record with tools like Promptwatch who gets named, which domains get cited and with what sentiment. You see your share of answers per model, next to the same numbers for your competitors.
It depends on your starting position. One brand that began entirely from scratch, Hogedruk.be, took one in five ChatGPT answers in its market within six months. Established brands with a healthy site often see their first mentions appear sooner.
Especially there. AI models weigh the quality of your answers more heavily than the size of your company. A two-person publisher we work with is more visible than Bol.com in AI answers about children's books. In a niche the question space is smaller too, so it is faster to occupy.
An llms.txt is a file on your site that tells AI systems in plain text what you offer and which pages matter most. It is young and no guarantee, but it costs little and makes your site easier for models to read. We include it in every engagement by default, alongside structured data.
We usually schedule an intro call within a few days, and the full engagement starts two to three weeks after sign-off. Fill in the form below; we reply within one working day.
Related pages
How often do AI models mention your brand?
Get in touch and tell us in which market you want to be named and who owns the answers there today. We dig into your situation and come back with insights and a concrete game plan with next steps. We reply within one working day.