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James Thompson
Illustration of an AI answer panel citing linked sources

Generative engine optimization · AiEO

When an AI answers for your customer, make sure it's quoting you

A growing share of research now ends inside a generated answer instead of a results page. Getting named in that answer is a discipline of its own — and it rewards the same rigour that classic SEO always has.

The six levers of AI visibility

Entity clarity

Models reason about entities, not keywords. I make sure your brand, people, products and locations are described consistently across your site, your schema and the third-party sources models learn from.

Extractable answers

Clear question-shaped headings, direct opening answers, definitions, comparison tables and specifics — the formats retrieval systems can lift cleanly and attribute back to you.

Evidence and originality

Assistants prefer sources with something to cite: original data, named experts, dates, prices, methodology. Generic filler content is invisible to them.

Retrieval-friendly technical setup

AI crawler access, clean server-side HTML, fast responses and structured data so the content can actually be fetched and parsed at answer time.

Off-site presence

Models draw on review sites, directories, forums and industry publications. Showing up in those sources shapes what the assistant says about you.

Measurement

Prompt-set tracking, share-of-citation benchmarking against competitors, AI bot log analysis and GA4 AI-referral reporting.

What a GEO engagement looks like

Practical, testable work — not speculation about what models might do next year.

  • Prompt audit: what assistants say about you and your competitors today
  • Entity and brand-consistency review across site, schema and third-party profiles
  • Content restructuring so key answers sit in the first 60 words of a section
  • FAQ, HowTo, Product and Organization schema to disambiguate meaning
  • Crawler access policy for GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended
  • Ongoing citation tracking with a quarterly share-of-voice benchmark

GEO / AiEO questions

What is generative engine optimization (GEO / AiEO)?

It's the practice of making your content easy for AI systems — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot and Gemini — to retrieve, understand, trust and cite. Where SEO optimizes for a ranked list of links, GEO optimizes for being the source inside a generated answer.

Does GEO replace SEO?

No. AI answers are largely assembled from content that already ranks and is already crawlable, so classic SEO is the entry ticket. GEO layers entity clarity, extractable structure and citation-worthy evidence on top of it.

How do you measure AI visibility?

By prompt-testing the queries your buyers actually ask across the major assistants, tracking which brands get cited, monitoring AI crawler activity in server logs, and watching referral traffic from AI sources in GA4.

Want to know what AI is saying about your brand right now?

I'll run a prompt audit across the major assistants and show you where you're cited, where a competitor is, and what it would take to change that.