What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimisation in plain English. Sources included, nothing to sell.

A practical guide to Generative Engine Optimisation, and how AI answers pick sources.

Status: Live · content · built and run by Jack Stovell at Adapt Progress Evolve

What it is

What is GEO? is a free, single-page guide to Generative Engine Optimisation, which means improving how visible and accurately represented a site is in answers from ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity. I link the sources, and there's nothing to sell.

Who it's for

I wrote it for business owners and marketers who keep hearing about GEO from agencies and just want an honest answer on what it is and what it can promise.

How it works

  1. What it is. GEO sits on top of SEO rather than replacing it, and it overlaps with AEO.
  2. How answers happen. Not every AI answer involves a live search, so the guide keeps training and retrieval apart.
  3. What to do. Principles, crawler access, a worked small-business example and a first-30-days plan.
  4. How to measure. A vendor's visibility score only describes its own sample of prompts, and the guide explains why.

Timeline

Facts

Price
Free
Common questions answered
10
Source code
MIT, on GitHub

Under the hood

Stack: Astro, Cloudflare Workers.

Agents in the fleet that work on it: SEO.

FAQ

What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

GEO, or Generative Engine Optimisation, is the practice of improving how visible and accurately represented your website is in answers from AI systems such as ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and Perplexity. It builds on SEO rather than replacing it.

Is SEO dead now that AI answers exist?

No, and What is GEO? says so plainly. Google's guidance is that a page must be indexed and eligible for a normal search snippet before it can feed AI Overviews or AI Mode.

Can anyone guarantee my business will be cited by ChatGPT?

No. What is GEO? is clear on this: citations vary by platform, query and time, and no legitimate practice can promise placement in someone else's generated answer.

Sources

Links