When ChatGPT recommends a business in your niche — does it recommend yours?

SEO is optimising for traditional search engine results pages — getting your blue link to rank in Google. AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is optimising for the answer box, AI Overviews, and voice assistants — getting your structured Q&A featured directly. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is optimising for large language models — getting ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to cite your brand when users ask "who does X?". They overlap but the techniques differ.

It's real. Princeton, Allen Institute and Microsoft Research published a peer-reviewed paper in 2023 ("GEO: Generative Engine Optimization") showing that specific content techniques can lift LLM citation rates by up to 40%. The paper is open on arXiv (arXiv:2311.09735). What's new is the marketing branding around it; the underlying techniques have been studied for two years.

Increasingly yes. Gartner forecasts that traditional Google search volume will fall 25% by 2026 as AI assistants take share. ChatGPT publicly reported over 200M weekly users in late 2024 and has been integrating live web search. Perplexity passed 100M monthly queries. The shift is real, but for now AI search is most mature in B2B software, professional services, and high-consideration consumer purchases — not in low-intent, high-volume product searches.

Two paths. (1) Pre-training data — content that appeared frequently and authoritatively in the model's training corpus. This rewards established brands, Wikipedia presence, and high-DA editorial mentions. (2) Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) at query time — the model searches the live web, picks the strongest matching pages, and synthesises an answer. RAG rewards proper schema markup, clear factual structure, and recent authority signals. We work on both.

For each client we run a baseline visibility audit (which AI models cite you for which queries today), build a brand-entity map (Wikidata, schema linking, knowledge-graph signals), structure content for citation extraction (clear claims with sources, comparison tables, FAQ schema), optimise for AI Overviews (Google's AI box pulls heavily from structured snippets), and pursue authoritative third-party mentions (the press, .gov.uk and .ac.uk citations are gold).

Faster than traditional SEO. Because the field is so new, competitors haven't done the work yet. Most clients see citation rates rise within 4-6 weeks. AI Overview placements come within 2-3 weeks if the structured data is right. Full LLM-citation lift takes longer because models retrain on quarterly cycles.

GEO usually pairs with a traditional SEO retainer rather than standing alone. We add it as a £350/mo layer on top of an existing SEO package. Standalone GEO retainers start at £750/mo. This is significantly cheaper than equivalent traditional SEO because the competition is thinner — for now.

No, it complements it. Even at Gartner's most aggressive forecast, traditional Google search will still be the largest single channel for years. What changes is the mix — you can't ignore AI search, and the businesses that get there first will own the citations for the long tail. We treat GEO as a hedge: do it now while it's cheap, before competitors catch up.

Fly High Media has been advertising AI Visibility Reports nationally — they're good at the lead-magnet step. Quirky Digital launched ChatGPT-SEO and Gemini-SEO pages in late 2024. We're the only Chester-based team doing this, with a hands-on retainer rather than a one-off audit, and we run our own AI Visibility Checker tool so you can see the baseline yourself before talking to us.