GEO: definition — visibility in the age of AI
GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, means optimising for AI answer engines — ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s generative answers: becoming the source that the AI reads, understands and recommends when a user asks a question. Where SEO optimised pages for keywords, GEO exposes answers and data that models can cite.
What changes compared with SEO
The fundamentals do not change: useful content, internal links, text that crawlers can access, and structured data consistent with the visible content. Google states that its AI features require no additional technical requirement, special file or “AI” markup. GEO-specific work is mainly about making an answer self-contained, attributable and easy to extract — without any guarantee that it will be cited.
For e-commerce, the product record becomes the answer
When a buyer asks an AI which product meets a need — “a low-flow kitchen mixer” or “ESD safety shoes” — the assistant recommends products whose specifications it can understand. A complete, structured record with normalised attributes provides more usable material than a sparse one. This richness can contribute to visibility and answer quality alongside established signals such as indexation, accessibility, source reputation and consistency between visible content and structured data. It never determines a recommendation on its own.
The honest limits
The discipline is young. There is no “magic markup” that guarantees a citation, and generative engines still rely heavily on established search signals. The robust lever remains the substance: rich, accurate and verifiable data. It has one rare advantage — it also serves human buyers. See also: product data enrichment.
Official sources
- Google Search Central — AI features and your website;
- OpenAI — publishers and developers FAQ;
- Perplexity — crawler documentation.
Sources accessed on 15 July 2026.