What is GEO? Generative Engine Optimisation in the AI Era

Search has always been evolving, but in the past few years, the pace and level of change have been dramatic. Rather than relying on traditional search platforms, customers are increasingly turning to AI tools to research, find solutions, buy products and compare services.

Ranking first in Google, while still important, is no longer enough on its own. With ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, users are getting answers directly from AI-powered search engines and chatbot platforms. This has led to significantly less clicks on traditional search results.

Ensuring your brand has visibility across this new landscape has quickly become imperative to compete. GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, is Prosperity Media’s solution for companies aiming to future-proof their organic search campaigns.

Key Takeaways: GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) is the process of improving brand visibility within AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, and Claude — focusing on citations, recommendations, and mentions rather than traditional rankings. GEO vs SEO: SEO targets webpage rankings, traffic, and clicks in traditional search engines; GEO targets citations, mentions, and AI referral traffic within LLM-generated responses. They serve different but complementary purposes. Results timeline: GEO outcomes typically emerge within 3–6 months, with quick wins (correcting brand misinformation, optimising key passages) possible within the first few weeks. GEO does not replace SEO: it complements it. SEO remains the primary organic traffic driver, while GEO extends visibility into AI-generated answers. The strongest strategy combines both. Why GEO matters: AI platforms increasingly deliver direct answers that reduce clicks on traditional results. Brands that don’t optimise for GEO risk being excluded from AI responses entirely, losing visibility to competitors who do.

What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimisation is the process of improving a brand’s visibility within generative AI engines or chatbots. Sometimes referred to as AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), it involves onsite and offsite initiatives and builds upon the foundations of SEO. While many argue that GEO is just SEO repackaged, we at Prosperity Media believe there are critical differences between these approaches. 

While strong SEO can lead to strong visibility in AI platforms, fully optimising a brand’s presence in AI-powered search requires deliberate initiatives we would not typically focus on when ranking in Google with a traditional SEO campaign.

How Does GEO Build Upon SEO?

While GEO represents a shift in how users find information, it builds upon the foundations of search engine optimisation. Both disciplines share the ultimate goal of ensuring your brand has visibility across the digital landscape.

To compete successfully, it is important to understand where these strategies overlap:

Visibility & Reach: Both strategies aim to maximise brand visibility, ensuring your content reaches the intended audience, whether they are searching on a traditional search engine or asking an AI chatbot.

Authority & Trust: Just as SEO relies on E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness), GEO relies on positioning brands as an authority to build consensus within LLM models.

Technical Foundations: Technical optimisation remains a shared necessity. Ensuring content is crawlable, mobile-friendly, and fast is critical for both search engine crawlers and AI agents to parse and understand your data.

Data-Driven Adaptation: Both approaches require a data-driven approach. Whether refining keywords for SEO or analysing citation patterns for GEO, continuous adaptation to algorithm updates and user behaviour is required to maintain performance.

GEO vs. SEO: What is the difference?

While strong SEO can lead to visibility in AI platforms, improving a brand’s presence in Generative Engines requires deliberate initiatives that differ from a traditional campaign.

The difference involves the initiatives that are prioritised and how the “engine” processes your content.

Feature	SEO	GEO
Primary Focus	Focuses on traditional search engines like Google and Bing.	Focuses on Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, AI Mode, and Claude.
Main Goal	Clicks, traffic and search engine rankings	Focuses on improving AI visibility, through being recommended, mentioned and cited by the platform.
Content Strategy	Content is produced to convey expertise across target terms or keywords to rank high on search result pages.	Content is crafted to be citable and declarative. Content is high-quality, contextually relevant, and easy to understand.
Measurement	Success is measured by rankings, organic traffic, and click-through rates.	Success is measured by referral traffic from AI engines, citations, and brand visibility within AI responses.
User Experience	Matches specific keywords to user queries to drive direct traffic.	Uses advanced AI to synthesise answers directly from search result pages, rather than providing a list of links.
Architecture	Indexes and ranks content relevant to specific keywords on a page-by-page basis.	Generates responses based on passages (or chunks) of content from relevant pages.
Medium	One-way information retrieval and indexing engine.	Two-way chat medium with context windows (memory) on chat history, creating highly personalised answers.
Behaviour	Keyword-based searches that seek information, usually on broader topics.	Hyper-specific prompts, asking in-depth questions around buying decisions, including their deal breakers.

Why does this matter, and what does it mean?

Traditional SEO is not going anywhere. When it comes to sending traffic, Google remains the clear leader. However, while high search rankings are important for remaining competitive,  ranking first is no longer enough. 

AI-powered platforms are capturing an ever-growing share of search activity; a shift that will accelerate as AI adoption continues to expand. Brands that want to win now and in the years to come must employ new approaches to stay visible.   

Is Your Brand Visible in the AI Search Era?

While traditional search engine rankings remain an important channel for businesses, there’s no denying that search behaviour is changing, and much of the traffic in the early-stage funnel is being “stolen” by AI. 

While traffic might decline, the traffic from AI chatbots is more engaged and more likely to convert.

If your brand isn’t optimised for GEO, you risk being excluded from AI-generated answers, effectively becoming invisible to a growing segment of your audience. An unoptimised brand presence can even lead to AI directing users to your competitors.

There’s a significant advantage for the brands that can adapt quickly to the changing landscape. Optimising for LLMs today means future LLMs are more likely to know and trust your brand.  Businesses are already seeing a significant increase in conversion rates from users sent via LLMs versus traditional SEO.

Why Choose Prosperity Media for GEO?

• Pioneers in Search: We have been at the forefront of SEO for over a decade, and we are now leading the transition to GEO.
• Data-Driven Approach: We don’t guess. Our strategies are backed by data and a deep understanding of how Large Language Models work.
• Holistic Strategy: Our GEO services are integrated with our award-winning SEO, Content, and Digital PR offerings to provide a comprehensive solution for online visibility.
• Proven Results: We have a track record of delivering tangible results for medium to enterprise clients across the globe.

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Our Phased Approach to GEO

Achieving visibility across AI-driven search platforms requires a structured, phased approach. At Prosperity Media, we have developed a proven methodology that builds on deep brand analysis, technical foundations, and strategic implementation to deliver measurable results.

Phase 1: Brand Auditing & Quick Wins

The first phase focuses on understanding how your brand is currently being interpreted, cited, and surfaced across AI search environments. Before implementing any strategy, it is essential to establish a clear picture of your brand’s presence across platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, and Claude.

During this phase, we evaluate how LLMs represent your brand, identifying misinformation, outdated details, or missing brand attributes that may be affecting how AI platforms present your business to potential customers. We analyse query fan-out patterns to understand how users are reaching (or missing) your brand through AI-generated responses, and audit the sources that LLMs are citing when answering questions related to your services.

A critical component of Phase 1 involves identifying friction points and deal breakers surfaced in AI tools, such as cost concerns, location limitations, or service gaps, that may be steering potential customers towards competitors. This insight directly informs the quick-win strategies we implement to establish a trusted brand baseline from the outset.

Phase 2: Technical Analysis

Strong GEO performance depends on a technically sound website that AI crawlers and agents can access, parse, and understand. Phase 2 involves a comprehensive technical SEO analysis to ensure your site is AI-crawlable, properly structured, and optimised for generative engine visibility.

A major focus of this phase is ensuring your website uses server-side rendering (SSR). Many modern websites rely heavily on JavaScript to render content on the client side. While this may work for Google crawlers, AI crawlers and LLM agents often cannot execute JavaScript, meaning they see a blank page where your content should be. Ensuring your key pages are server-side rendered is essential for AI discoverability; without it, your content is effectively invisible to the models that power AI search.

Beyond rendering, we conduct a thorough audit using our 100+ point technical checklist, covering AI-crawler access issues, content rendering blocks, server-side restrictions, and opportunities to improve structured content delivery. This includes implementing granular schema markup to feed AI models authoritative, structured data about your brand, services, and expertise.

We also work closely with your content and development team to build structured landing pages, internal linking maps, and entity building designed for AI readability. Clear hierarchical content structures, such as logical heading structures, tables of contents, and well-organised sections, make it significantly easier for AI models to extract and cite your content accurately.

Phase 3: Strategy Implementation

With the insights earned from brand auditing and technical analysis, Phase 3 is where your strategy comes to life. This phase focuses on two core initiatives: on-site content optimisation and off-site citation building.

On-site, we implement passage-level content optimisations designed to improve how LLMs interpret and surface your brand. Unlike traditional SEO, where content is optimised at the page level for keyword coverage, AI systems read and cite at the passage level. We craft content with declarative, citable statements that AI models can extract and reference in their responses. This means producing content that is specific, authoritative, and structured for answer coverage rather than just topic coverage.

Off-site, we focus on placing citations and brand mentions within trusted third-party sources that LLMs frequently reference. This strengthens the authority signals that AI models associate with your brand, increasing the likelihood of being recommended, mentioned, and cited across generative platforms. Our Digital PR team plays a key role here, securing strategic placements that build brand consensus within the models.

Our Reporting Suite

Measuring GEO performance requires a different toolkit than traditional SEO. At Prosperity Media, we have built a comprehensive reporting suite to track your brand’s visibility, engagement, and conversions across AI engines.

Our custom dashboards built in Looker Studio track AI referral traffic, engagement metrics, and conversion performance, giving you a clear picture of how AI-driven visitors interact with your brand.

We use Hall Analytics and Ahrefs Brand Radar for competitive benchmarking and custom prompt tracking, monitoring how your brand appears across multiple LLM models in response to target prompts over time. Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster tools and server log analysis help us track AI crawler activity and identify indexing or access issues.

Together, these tools provide a full view of your brand’s LLM performance, from visibility and citation frequency to downstream engagement and conversions.

GORentals Case Study

Future-Proof Your Digital Strategy

The way customers search is changing. Don’t let your brand get left behind. Let us help you navigate the new landscape of generative search and secure your online visibility for years to come.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is the difference between SEO and GEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) focuses on improving your rankings in traditional search engines like Google, with success measured through keyword rankings, organic traffic, and click-through rates. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) focuses on improving your brand’s visibility within AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity, and Claude. While SEO aims to get your pages ranking for target keywords, GEO aims to get your brand recommended, cited, and mentioned within AI-generated responses. The two disciplines share common foundations in authority, trust, and technical optimisation, but differ in how content is structured, what success looks like, and the specific initiatives required to compete.

How long does it take to see results from GEO?

GEO results typically begin to emerge within three to six months of implementation, though timelines vary depending on the strength of your existing SEO foundation, the competitiveness of your industry, and the current state of your brand’s AI visibility. Phase 1 quick wins, such as correcting brand misinformation and optimising key passages, can produce noticeable improvements within the first few weeks. More significant gains in citation frequency and AI referral traffic build progressively as your authority signals strengthen and LLMs update their training data and retrieval sources.

What platforms do you optimise for?

We optimise across all major generative AI platforms, including ChatGPT (OpenAI), Google AI Overviews and AI Mode (Gemini), Perplexity, and Claude (Anthropic). Our approach is platform-agnostic by design, as the core principles of building brand authority, producing citable content, and ensuring technical accessibility benefit visibility across all current and future LLM-powered search platforms.

Can GEO replace our existing SEO strategy?

No, and it should not. GEO is designed to complement and enhance your existing SEO strategy, not replace it. Google remains the dominant driver of organic traffic, and strong traditional rankings also contribute to GEO performance, as many AI platforms draw from top-ranking search results when generating responses. A comprehensive digital strategy should incorporate both SEO and GEO to ensure visibility across the full spectrum of how users discover, research, and engage with brands today.

How do you measure the success of a GEO campaign?

We measure GEO success through a combination of metrics that go beyond traditional rankings. These include brand visibility and mention frequency across target prompts in major LLMs, citation rates in AI-generated responses, referral traffic from AI platforms (tracked via our custom Looker Studio dashboards), engagement and conversion metrics from AI-referred visitors, and competitive share of voice within AI responses. Our reporting suite, combining Looker Studio, Hall Analytics, Webmaster tools, and Brand Radar custom reports, provides a comprehensive view of performance across all key metrics.