GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

Where AEO targets being quoted, GEO targets being represented. A generative engine such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Copilot or Google’s AI Mode synthesizes an answer from many sources at once. The goal is that the synthesis reflects your brand, your positioning and your facts, even when no single page of yours is the one being read.

That shifts the work toward things classic SEO barely touched: entity clarity, consistency of claims across the whole web rather than on one page, structured data that connects your organization to its people, services and locations, and content written in a shape a model can compress without losing the point. If your site says one thing, your directory listings say another and your LinkedIn page a third, the model has to pick, and it may pick wrong.

It is the newest of these disciplines and the least settled. Anyone selling a guaranteed method for it, ourselves included, should be treated with suspicion. What can be done honestly is make a brand easy to represent correctly.

The three overlap, and on our own site we work them as layers of one plan. What separates them is the outcome each one optimizes for.

In practice SEO produces the indexable pages, AEO shapes some of them into quotable answers, and GEO makes sure everything said about the brand, on the site and off it, tells the same story.

• Write 10 to 20 prompts a real customer would type, such as “best SEO agency in Buenos Aires for a small business” or “who offers GEO services in Argentina”, plus direct ones like “what does North Blue Agency do”.
• Run them by hand in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude and Copilot, and check Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode for the same questions. Use a clean session where possible and note the date, because answers change.
• Record for each answer whether the brand appears, whether the description is correct, which sources are cited and which competitors are named instead.
• Trace every wrong fact to its source. If an answer gives an old address or an outdated service list, find where it came from (a directory, an old profile, a page on your own site) and correct it there.
• Align the core description everywhere: website, Google Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories, with the same name, location and service wording. Add Organization schema with sameAs links to those profiles.
• Make the pages you want cited easy to quote: an explicit title, an opening paragraph that states the offer in one sentence, and questions answered directly. Confirm in Google Search Console that those pages are indexed.
• Repeat the same prompts every month and compare. One answer proves little; a trend across several weeks shows whether the picture is improving.

• What AI assistants currently say about the brand, asked in plain language, before changing anything.
• Organization schema with sameAs links to every official profile.
• Name, location and service descriptions matching across site, Business Profile, LinkedIn and directories.
• Service pages whose titles and opening paragraphs state the offer in one clear sentence.
• Third-party mentions: where the brand is described by others, and whether those descriptions are current.

Each surface gathers information differently. Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode draw on Google’s own index, so indexation and the Business Profile weigh heavily there. Perplexity searches the web live and shows its sources, which makes it the easiest place to see which pages feed an answer. ChatGPT combines what the model learned in training with web search when it decides a search is needed, so an outdated description can survive in some answers for a while after you fix your pages.

Claude and Copilot add two more indexes to watch. Claude’s web search runs on Brave Search, so if Brave has not crawled your site, or still knows it by old URLs, that is the version Claude reads. Copilot answers from Bing, which also feeds part of ChatGPT’s search, so Bing Webmaster Tools and a clean sitemap there matter as much as Google Search Console does.

For local businesses, generative answers to “near me” or neighborhood questions often draw on map data, reviews and directory listings. A consistent name, address and phone across the Business Profile and directories is part of GEO for any business that sells to a specific area.

1. Small business.Some prospects now ask an assistant for recommendations before they search. A small business with one clear description across its site and profiles is easy to include; one with three different descriptions is easy to get wrong.
2. E-commerce.Shopping questions such as “best running shoes for flat feet” get answered with brands and product names. Product pages with clear specifications, honest comparisons and reviews on third-party sites give models accurate material to work with.
3. Multilingual site like ours.Models answer in the user’s language but can draw on sources in any language. We keep the English and Spanish descriptions of North Blue saying the same thing, so an answer in either language describes the same agency.
4. Local service business.Questions like “who repairs washing machines in Palermo” mix local and generative search. The Business Profile, reviews and service area pages carry most of the weight there.

• Treating GEO as a separate project from SEO. Crawlable, indexed, well-structured pages are still the raw material.
• Rewriting the brand description differently on every profile, which gives models conflicting facts.
• Publishing thin pages stuffed with AI-related keywords and expecting citations.
• Measuring success by a single prompt on a single day. Generative answers vary, so we track patterns over time.

GEO sits next to answer engine optimization and depends on solid fundamentals. If you want help making your brand easy for generative engines to describe, see our GEO service.