What Is Generative Engine Optimisation?

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the work of improving how a business and its content appear in answers produced by generative AI systems. That can mean a linked citation, an accurate description of your services, or inclusion in a relevant product recommendation.

You’ll also see generative engine optimisation, alongside AI SEO, AEO, LLM SEO and LLMO.

Pick your poison as the boundaries overlap, and the terminology is still used inconsistently.

Google itself treats optimisation for its generative search features as part of SEO in its official AI optimisation guide.

For a business, the goal is to be discoverable and accurately represented when someone asks a relevant question.

A citation can help with that, but it doesn’t automatically mean the answer recommends your business or sends you a customer.

How Google’s AI Overviews Differ From Featured Snippets

Featured snippets typically display an extract from a page. AI Overviews generate an aggregated response that can bring information from several sources together, with links for further reading.

That changes what you should look at when reviewing the results.

Check the questions being answered, the sources used, and the information that helps someone make a decision.

Google describes query fan-out as issuing related searches to help build an answer. Its AI features documentation explains that AI Overviews and AI Mode can use this process. AI Mode also supports follow-up exploration.

For example, a question about choosing an ecommerce platform might lead to information about transaction fees, integrations and migration work. A useful comparison needs to explain those trade-offs. Repeating “best ecommerce platform” won’t do the job.

Follow-up questions in Google AI Mode count as new queries in Search Console. Short queries can be worth investigating, but their wording alone does not establish an AI Mode origin. Illustrative examples include:

• “yes”
• “no”
• “explain….”
• “tell me price”

LLMs prompt additional search. So the role of any good SEO is to identify the common queries that will appear within this funnel, by category and by product.

Once a user lands, internal links still help readers find the next useful page and help search engine bots understand contextual relevance (this is still SEO).

But for GEO specifically, connecting a query to relevant specs, pricing or comparison resources may help your pages appear for related questions. For best practice setup here, you can see details covered in our internal linking guide.

What the State of Search Research Means for GEO

Every quarter, Datos publishes a “State of Search” report.

This is full of incredibly useful data, all based on clickstream metrics. If you’re unfamiliar, that basically means real user activity. Clickstream can track what people do and where they go.

Within the latest research of Q2 2026, traditional search remained a much larger part of desktop activity than standalone AI tools in the Datos State of Search Q2 2026 report. At the same time, a smaller share of Google searches led to an external organic click.

The report’s June-to-June comparison shows that shift clearly.

These are desktop observations from the US and EU/UK. They don’t establish what happened in Australia, include mobile behaviour, or isolate AI Overviews as the cause. I suspect similar patterns may exist in Australia and on mobile, but this dataset cannot establish that.

A search ending without a click is also a separate outcome from one continuing on a Google-owned property.

My State of Search Q2 analysis looks at the wider implications of this. For GEO planning, I’d keep investing in Google while testing where AI answers influence the questions your customers ask.

That means giving people a reason to visit after the summary. A worked example, useful comparison, original research or a tool can take the decision further than a definition alone.

SEO Foundations for AI Search Visibility

Your priority pages need to be accessible, useful and credible before you spend time on specialised GEO tactics.

Start with the pages closest to a business outcome. For an agency, that might be a service page, a pricing explanation and a case study. For a retailer, it could be a product range, a buying guide and delivery information.

Check Access and Indexing

For Google’s AI search features, a page needs to be indexed, eligible to display a search snippet, and included through the Search generative AI control. Use Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool to check the intended page, its selected canonical and its indexing status. Check that the main content loads, internal links work and your firewall isn’t preventing intended crawler access.

Google’s Search generative AI control lets site owners manage inclusion in AI Overviews, AI Mode and specified generative Discover features. Google says it rolled out worldwide on 31 August 2026, with inclusion as the default (I suggest keeping it on!). Check the effective setting and any inherited parent-property choice.

For ChatGPT search, review OpenAI’s crawler documentation. OAI-SearchBot and GPTBot have different purposes: search access and model training can be controlled separately. Avoid applying a blanket bot rule without checking what it affects.

Crawler access makes content available for consideration. It doesn’t guarantee selection. Our SEO checklist covers the broader technical checks.

Show Why The Information Is Trustworthy

Again, this is a longtime E-E-A-T principle in SEO.

Clear authorship, accurate business details and evidence behind your claims help people assess the page. For a service page, explain who does the work, what’s included, where you operate and what a suitable engagement looks like.

Google’s people-first content guidance encourages original information, demonstrable experience and clear sourcing. Apply that to the substance of the page: add the method behind a result, explain an exception, or show what happened in a real project you have permission to discuss.

Keep names, services and contact details consistent across your website and relevant business profiles. For local businesses, maintain actual locations, opening hours and service information through your local SEO work.

There is no useful reason to turn this into an entity-density target. Name the products, people and concepts needed to explain the subject, and support the important claims.

Structured Data and Schema for AI Search

Structured data describes information on a page in a standard format. Use the types that accurately fit the content and support relevant search features.

Google’s AI optimisation guidance is explicit: “there’s no special schema.org markup you need to add.” Its structured data guidelines also require markup to represent the page accurately, rather than introduce invisible or misleading claims.

Keep JSON-LD manageable and test it with the Rich Results Test. Stable @id references can connect related items in your markup; they don’t establish a guaranteed path to an AI citation.

The existence of a schema.org type doesn’t mean Google offers a corresponding rich result. Google retired HowTo rich results in 2023, and its documentation changelog records the removal of FAQ rich results from 7 May 2026. Useful questions and step-by-step instructions can still belong on the page.

A May 2026 Ahrefs study followed 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD between August 2025 and March 2026. Comparing 30 days before and after against matched controls, it found no clear citation uplift attributable to adding schema.

The pages already had substantial AI citation visibility, the study pooled schema types, and other page changes could have influenced the results. That limits how far the finding travels. Use appropriate schema for its documented purposes; treat claims of an automatic citation boost with caution.

How to Structure Content for AI Search

Put the useful answer early. This is called a BLUF (bottom line up front) statement, then give readers the evidence and detail needed to act on it.

A BLUF is great for SEO anyway. What is old is new, right? A solid example of a BLUF format is as follows:

[Brand + product/service] is a [category definition] perfect for [target customer profile]

In practice this would look like: “Intellar’s GEO service is a data-led and SEO backed offering perfect for enterprise brands”.

From there, create a logical heading flow so information is not repeated. Short sentences help when the subject is complicated.

Question headings work when they match a real reader question.

Use keyword research to map the topic before writing. Add questions from sales calls, support requests and relevant search results so the page reflects the decision people are trying to make.

Then work through the draft:

• Lead with the takeaway, ideally within the first 100 words, when that suits the topic.
• Give each section a clear job and group related information together.
• Keep the source, date and limitation close to a statistic.
• Use a table when readers need to compare the same attributes across options.
• Explain when your recommendation changes, including relevant costs, constraints or exceptions.

This is a practical content writing approach. It doesn’t require breaking every answer into a fixed number of words or sprinkling synonyms through paragraphs. Google explicitly says it has no special requirement for content “chunking” or an llms.txt file to appear in its AI features.

A Worked Page Example

Imagine a retailer has a guide to choosing football boots. The page currently offers a short definition and a list of products.

You would start by explaining how the playing surface affects the choice. Then compare the relevant options, check manufacturers’ usage guidance, and show close-up photographs of the products being discussed.

Put the limitations next to the recommendation. If a boot’s suitability depends on the specific surface or the manufacturer’s warranty terms, make that clear before someone buys it.

Link to available products and explain the returns policy. The reader can now make a more informed decision, and the page provides specific information that a generic product list lacks.

The improvement is useful whether someone arrives through a standard result, an AI citation or a shared link. Any effect on AI visibility still needs to be measured.

For the earlier thinking behind Google’s conversational search direction, see my June 2025 AI Mode analysis.

Avoid Low-Value Content

A common and mistaken trope in the current AI goldrush is that you need a page for every prompt.

Don’t do this without a distinct, useful purpose. It can result in low-value content or scaled content abuse.

Given the scale of traditional Google search in the research above, I would strongly recommend not doing anything for the sake of AI that risks Google giving you a slap.

So before publishing another page, ask what it adds to the material you already have. A separate URL needs a distinct purpose or useful depth that the existing page cannot reasonably provide.

Every page needs to serve a purpose. Here’s what you can do:

• Combine overlapping explanations when they serve the same reader task.
• Replace unsupported statistics and broad claims with sources, examples or a clearer account of the work.
• A service page needs meaningful detail about that service and its suitability for the customer.

Neither an AI-written label nor a human-written label tells you whether the finished page is useful. So be sure to review what the reader actually gets.

Build Your Presence Beyond Your Website

People encounter your business through reviews, videos, industry coverage, directories and conversations as well as your own pages.

Be available in the places that help a customer assess your work.

A software business might need an accurate integration listing and detailed customer reviews. A local service business may get more value from a complete business profile and useful project photographs.

Our social search analysis explores how these touchpoints fit into the wider journey. Keep your business information consistent, contribute useful material and correct factual errors where you can.

Seek coverage because you have something worth sharing: a study, an expert explanation, a useful tool or a project with evidence behind it. Avoid manufactured reviews and repetitive promotional posts. A third-party mention is useful context to investigate, not proof that a platform will recommend you.

Keep Your Content and Business Information Current

Refresh a page when the underlying information changes or the page no longer answers the reader’s question well.

A tool guide can become inaccurate when features change. A service page can fall behind your actual offer. A statistics article needs the measurement period beside each figure, even when the surrounding advice remains useful.

Google’s sitemap guidance says it ignores changefreq and priority. RSS and Atom feeds can help expose recent URLs, but neither a feed nor a ping gives you a guaranteed AI inclusion time.

The indexifembedded directive concerns embedded content accompanied by noindex. It is not an indexing-speed setting. Server logs can show crawler visits; they cannot prove that an AI answer has incorporated your latest edit.

Measuring GEO and AI Search Visibility

Track what appears in the answer separately from what happens on your website. This keeps a rise in citations from being mistaken for a rise in leads.

Use Platform Reports and Analytics Together

Google’s Generative AI performance report in Search Console reports impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, with pages, countries, devices and dates. Google notes a worldwide rollout on 31 August 2026; availability can depend on sufficient impressions.

The documented report measures impressions, not separate AI clicks or CTR. AI feature data also remains included in the wider Web performance report. Keep those views separate when reporting totals so you don’t count the same impressions twice.

Bing Webmaster Tools’ AI Performance report shows cited pages and grounding queries across supported Microsoft and partner experiences. A grounding query is part of the retrieval process; it should not be treated as the complete wording of a customer’s prompt.

Create an AI referral view in GA4 and inspect the actual sources and landing pages. OpenAI’s publisher guidance explains its ChatGPT referral tagging. Attribution remains incomplete when a person sees an answer and later visits through another route.

Tag phone links, forms and other useful on-site actions to measure what visitors do after they arrive. Those events cannot record someone who stays in a search result and never visits your website.

Keep Your Prompt Sample Consistent

Ahrefs Brand Radar and other tools can help investigate mentions and cited pages. Our AI visibility tools guide covers the options.

For a manageable starting point, choose 10 to 20 questions tied to a service or product decision. Record the platform, exact prompt, date, market and whether the result came from a search-enabled experience. Save the response and its cited URLs. Don’t make the prompts wildly long either.

Repeat the same checks over time and keep branded prompts separate from questions that don’t name your business. Review whether the answer describes your offer correctly, recommends it for an appropriate use case, and links to the intended page.

Treat the sample as a diagnostic. It doesn’t represent every answer customers receive. If a monitoring tool changes its prompt database or platform coverage, check that before interpreting a movement as business growth.

An Ahrefs experiment published in July 2026 illustrates why reading the answer matters. Researchers tracked 34 promotional pages across five domains and collected 9,886 answers from four AI platforms between February and May 2026.

Among answers citing a page promoting the Ahrefs Evolve conference, 43% did not mention the conference. A page could be cited while a competitor was recommended. This was a small, non-randomised brand experiment, so the percentage is not a general benchmark. It does show why a source link and a brand recommendation need separate checks.

Action Plan and Next Steps

Choose one commercially useful topic and improve the pages that support it before expanding.

1. Set the baseline. Save current search performance, available AI visibility, referral traffic and qualified enquiries for the relevant pages.
2. Check access. Review indexing, canonical selection, important crawler rules and the effective Google AI inclusion setting.
3. Refresh the substance. Correct outdated claims, answer missing buyer questions and add evidence you can stand behind.
4. Connect the information. Add relevant internal links and align product, business and profile details.
5. Review the outcome. Recheck the same questions and pages on a regular schedule. Record what changed before deciding what to expand.

The AI SEO services work at Intellar brings these tasks together. If you’d like help choosing the first pages to improve, book an Intellar consultation to plan the next sprint.