Generative engine optimisation is the practice of making your business visible inside AI-generated answers, the few sentences an assistant writes when someone asks it a question, instead of the ten blue links a search engine used to return.
The reason it has its own name is that the mechanics differ from ranking. When an answer is generated, there is no page two. The engine composes a response from sources it can parse and trust, names two or three businesses if the question is commercial, and everyone else is simply absent. Being the fourth-best option used to earn you real traffic; in a generated answer it earns you nothing.
How engines decide who to cite
No engine publishes its criteria, but the observable pattern is consistent. Pages that get cited tend to answer the question directly in the opening lines, name entities plainly (who you are, what you do, where you operate), carry verifiable specifics rather than marketing generalities, and agree with what other credible sources say about the same topic. Pages that bury the answer under a brand story rarely get lifted, however well they rank.
What GEO work actually involves
- ✓Mapping the questions your buyers put to assistants, which are phrased differently from typed searches
- ✓Auditing who gets cited for those questions today
- ✓Building or restructuring pages so an engine can quote them cleanly
- ✓Keeping human conversion intact, a page that reads like a spec sheet captures no enquiries
- ✓Measuring citations continuously, because generated answers change as engines re-crawl
Is it worth doing now?
The honest answer: yes, and mostly because so few businesses are doing it deliberately. Search behaviour is shifting faster than most companies' content plans, and the businesses being named in answers today are accumulating an advantage that compounds, assistants keep citing sources that have already proven reliable. The work also overlaps heavily with good SEO, so very little of it is wasted even where generated answers haven't taken over yet.