A generative engine does not hand out rankings. It assembles an answer from a handful of sources and names some of them. GEO is the work of being one of those sources. We are a UK team doing it hands-on: source quality, passage structure, entity corroboration and retrieval readiness, measured against what the models actually output.
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2020
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Quick answer
Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of making a website one of the sources a generative answer engine draws on when it composes a reply. Where classic SEO competes for a position in a list, GEO competes for inclusion in an answer that may never show a list at all. The deliverable is a citation and a mention, not a rank.
It matters because the shortlist has moved. A buyer asking ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Mode to compare options gets three or four named sources, and the rest of the web is simply absent from that moment. Being on page one is no longer the same thing as being in the running.
The mechanics are different from ranking too. Most generative answers are built by retrieval: the engine searches, fetches a small number of pages, and writes from passages inside them. That means the unit of optimisation is the passage, not the page. A page that answers in its first lines, in clean prose, with facts that can be checked elsewhere, is far easier to lift from than one that takes six paragraphs to get to the point.
The second mechanic is corroboration. Models weigh what independent sources say about you, not only what you say about yourself. If your own site and the rest of the web disagree about what you do, the engine resolves the conflict by using something it trusts more, which is usually a directory or a competitor. Fixing that disagreement is unglamorous and it is often where the biggest gain sits.
What we do
Eight workstreams. Which ones matter for you comes out of the audit, because the binding constraint differs a lot by site.
Rewriting pages so each section contains a self-contained, quotable answer. Engines lift passages, not pages, and a passage that depends on three paragraphs of build-up cannot be lifted without being rewritten, which is when your framing gets lost.
Making independent sources agree with your own claims about what you are and what you do. Where the web contradicts you, the engine trusts the web. This is the slowest part of GEO and usually the one that decides the outcome.
Making sure what the engine fetches is what a reader sees: server-rendered content, no critical text locked behind scripts a crawler will not run, clean headings, and a page that still makes sense without its navigation.
GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended each behave differently. We check they are permitted, reaching the right pages, and not being served something different from a human visitor.
Schema that states plainly what a page is and what the organisation behind it does. Not markup for its own sake: the properties that help a model resolve an entity and attribute a claim to it correctly.
A plain-text summary at the root of the site that tells a model what the organisation is and points at the pages worth reading. It is a proposed convention rather than a standard, and we treat it as cheap insurance, not a ranking lever.
Generative engines surface questions that never had a keyword volume attached. We build the pages that answer them, which is often where the easiest share of answers is available.
A fixed prompt set, re-run on a schedule across the engines, recording whether you are named, what is said and which URL is cited. Model answers vary between runs, so we report trends rather than single readings.
Why this matters
A generative answer is a compression of the web into a paragraph. Everything outside that paragraph is invisible to the person reading it, however well it ranks.
Want to see who the engines cite in your category?
The audit runs your buyers' questions through the generative engines and sends you the sources they use, with the reasons those sources win. It is free and the findings are yours.
LLM SEO
GEO and LLM SEO describe the same work from different angles. Six things worth understanding before anyone sells you either.
A model either knows something from training or fetches it at question time. You cannot influence a finished training run, but retrieval happens live, every time, and that is where the work pays. Most assistants now retrieve for anything current or specific.
Optimise for retrieval; treat training as a slow bonus
Retrieval pulls a chunk of text. If the chunk contains a complete answer, it gets used close to verbatim and your framing survives. If it does not, the model paraphrases from several sources and your contribution dissolves.
Self-contained passages keep your words intact
A claim repeated by independent sources is treated as more reliable than the same claim made once, on your own site. This is why directory listings and trade coverage often beat a better-written page.
Agreement across the web is the real authority signal
For anything that changes, engines prefer recent sources. Pages with no visible date, or with facts that contradict newer coverage, tend to fall out of answers even when they were once cited.
Maintained pages hold their place; abandoned ones do not
A plain-text file at the site root describing the organisation and linking to key pages. Support is partial and unverified, so we add it because it is nearly free, not because it is a lever. Anyone presenting it as a ranking factor is overselling.
Cheap to add, honest about what it does
Model outputs vary between runs, users and sessions. A single screenshot proves nothing in either direction. Measurement has to be a fixed prompt set run repeatedly, reported as a trend.
Trends are evidence; screenshots are anecdotes
How we work
The first stage is free, and you keep what it finds whether or not we work together.
We assemble the questions your buyers ask, run them across the generative engines, and record which sources get used and cited. Alongside that we check retrieval readiness, crawler access, entity consistency and passage structure on your own pages.
The audit normally isolates two or three causes. We set out what to do first, what it takes and what we expect it to shift. Where we think the return is poor for the effort, we say so before you spend anything.
We do the work: restructuring pages into quotable passages, correcting entity facts across your site and third-party sources, fixing retrieval and crawler problems, adding schema and llms.txt, and building the content for unanswered questions.
The same prompts run on the same schedule, so before and after are comparable. You get a monthly written note: what we changed, what the engines now say, which citations appeared, and what has not moved.
Clear scope · Regular demos · Full handover
Honest fit
This is a months-long discipline with no guaranteed placement. It suits some situations far better than others.
The terms, separated
Three labels that overlap and get used loosely. This is how we draw the lines, and which page covers which.
| GEO | AEO | Classic SEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you win | Inclusion in a generated answer | The direct answer slot | A position in a list of links |
| Surface | ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Mode, Gemini | Featured snippets, People Also Ask, voice | Standard results pages |
| Unit of work | The passage | The question-and-answer pair | The page |
| Decided by | Source quality and corroboration | Format and directness | Relevance, links, technical health |
| Reported as | Share of answers naming you | Snippets captured | Position and clicks |
| Typical horizon | Weeks for fixes, months for authority | Weeks | Months |
| Read more | This page | AEO agency UK | Technical SEO agency |
Sectors
Categories where buyers ask an assistant before they ask a supplier.
FAQ
What buyers ask us about GEO, answered without the hype that surrounds the term.
Still have a question?
Ask us directly — a senior engineer will get back to you.
Ask about your projectIt is the work of making your website one of the sources a generative answer engine uses and names when it composes a reply. The engines in scope are ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot. The outcome you are buying is inclusion and citation in answers, rather than a position in a list of links.
In practice yes. GEO describes the surface, a generative engine, and LLM SEO describes the system underneath, a large language model. Agencies use them interchangeably and so do we. Both refer to the same work: being retrievable, quotable and corroborated.
AEO is about owning the direct answer to a specific question, which includes long-standing surfaces like featured snippets and voice results. GEO is about being a source inside a longer generated answer that may synthesise several sites. They share techniques, particularly answer-first writing, but they are measured differently. We cover AEO on its own page.
No. The engine decides what it writes, answers vary between runs, and model updates change behaviour without notice. Any agency guaranteeing citation is selling something it does not control. What we commit to is the work and honest measurement of what the engines actually say over time.
It is a proposed convention, not an adopted standard, and support is unverified. We add it because it costs almost nothing and does no harm, not because it moves answers. If someone tells you llms.txt is a ranking factor, treat the rest of their advice with the same caution.
Retrieval and structure fixes can show up within weeks, because they change what the engine finds when it fetches your pages. Corroboration, which is the part that decides contested categories, takes months. We will tell you which of the two dominates your situation after the audit.
With a fixed prompt set, re-run on a schedule across the engines, recording whether you are named, what is said and which URL is cited. Because outputs vary between runs, we report trends across repeated runs rather than individual screenshots. The variance is real and we do not hide it.
Usually yes, and they share a foundation. Retrieval depends on the same technical health that ranking does, and generative engines still lean heavily on conventional search to find candidates. GEO is an addition to that work, not a replacement for it.
No. SpiderHunts is an agency. A team does the audit, writes and implements the changes and reports on them. There is nothing to log into and no per-seat licence.
SpiderHunts Technologies Ltd, registered at Companies House under number 16718403, with an office at 182-184 High Street N, Office 14607, London E6 2JA. Invoicing is in pounds. The engineering team works from Lahore, which we say plainly rather than implying otherwise.
Start here
Send us your site and the questions your buyers ask. We will run them across the generative engines, record which sources get cited and why, and send you the findings. It is free, there is no obligation, and if we think GEO is not where your gain is, we will say so.
Thanks — that’s with us.
A senior engineer reads every enquiry and will get back to you shortly.
Book a time that suits you, or send a message and get an answer sooner.