3 October 2026
GEO means generative engine optimisation: improving how your business and content appear in AI-generated answers. For a local business, the aim is to contribute useful information when someone asks a question about the services you offer. A source link can then bring that person to your website, where they can learn more and make an enquiry.
Our video follows a garden-maintenance business in Ennis, County Clare. The customer wants regular help with their garden and asks an AI assistant what to look for. That question starts a commercial conversation: which services suit them, how visits work and which business to contact.
How GEO connects with SEO and AEO
The terms describe related work with a different focus. Here’s how we use them when planning a small-business website.
| Approach | Focus |
|---|---|
| SEO | Search engine optimisation helps search engines discover and understand your pages, so people can find relevant services in search results. |
| AEO | Answer engine optimisation focuses on clear answers to people’s questions, including answers surfaced through search and assistants. |
| GEO | Generative engine optimisation focuses specifically on how your business and source material appear within generated responses. |
These approaches overlap. A clear, accessible service page can help search engines understand the business, answer a customer’s question and provide useful facts for an AI response. Google says established SEO practices remain relevant to its AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google’s guidance on AI features and your website connects those experiences with the same search foundations.
Where OpenAI, Anthropic and Google fit
Customers can use AI assistants to research services and compare options before visiting a business website. Each of the three major providers offers ways to connect an answer with information on the web:
- ChatGPT from OpenAI can search the web and include links to relevant sources. OpenAI explains ChatGPT search.
- Claude from Anthropic can search live web content and provide citations in its response. Anthropic explains web search and source links.
- Gemini from Google can show sources and related links alongside responses. Google explains sources in Gemini.
When an assistant uses web search, it can bring together information from several pages. Your service page might explain the work you offer, while a gardening guide contributes seasonal advice. The answer gives the customer a way to understand the subject and follow relevant links.
For your business, the useful question is: what can your website contribute to that decision?
An Ennis gardener: turn service details into useful answers
The customer in our video asks:
What should I look for in a garden maintenance company in Ennis that can keep my garden tidy throughout the year?
A useful service page starts by saying what the business does and where it works. In our example, that is garden maintenance in Ennis, County Clare, with regular visits and one-off tidy-ups for domestic gardens. The page then names the work: lawn mowing, edging, weeding and hedge trimming.
Those details let a customer compare the offer with their own garden. The next questions are practical. How are visits arranged? What happens to the clippings? What should they send when requesting a quote?
Our example explains that visits are arranged around the garden and the season. It answers the waste question directly:
We agree how clippings and other garden waste will be handled when preparing your quote.
That gives an AI answer a specific fact to draw on and gives the visitor something useful to discuss when they enquire. For your own site, use the arrangements you actually offer. Explain your service area, the work included and how a customer takes the next step.
The same approach applies to a cleaning company, a trades business or a professional service. Start with the questions people ask before hiring you. Put the answers on the relevant service page, close to the information they explain.
How AI discovery can lead to more customers and sales
The commercial value comes from connecting discovery with a useful next step. A person sees information about your service in an AI answer, follows a source link, reads your page and requests a quote. An enquiry becomes a sale when you agree the work and the customer books it.
For the Ennis gardener, the customer can arrive already knowing that the business offers regular domestic garden visits. They can ask about their garden, access and timing, with a clearer idea of what the business provides. Relevant website visits and better-informed enquiries create opportunities to win suitable work.
Make the route easy to follow. On a service page, place a clear contact option after the information people need. A garden-maintenance enquiry could ask for the location, the work required and whether the customer wants a one-off tidy-up or regular visits. Photographs can help the business prepare for the conversation.
We would judge progress through website visits, relevant enquiries and agreed jobs. Those outcomes show how discovery contributes to the business.
What the GEO research found
The paper GEO: Generative Engine Optimization, accepted at KDD in 2024, tested changes to source content and measured its visibility in generated answers. Adding relevant citations, credible quotations and statistics performed well in those experiments. The strongest methods reported a 30–40% relative improvement on a visibility measure that accounts for source word count and citation position. The result describes how sources appeared in the tested answers. Read the research and its results.
Our practical takeaway for a service business is to give useful explanations something concrete to stand on. That could be photographs of completed work, a description of your process or a specific answer based on the questions customers regularly ask. Where you draw on published advice, link to the source and explain its relevance.
For gardening advice, a link to the RHS lawn-mowing guide can help a reader understand the seasonal context. Your own page can explain how you arrange the maintenance service. Each contributes information the customer can use.
Give your website a strong foundation
Start with the service page customers are most likely to need. Describe the work clearly, include your genuine service area and make the enquiry route easy to use on a phone. Add answers that help someone decide whether to contact you.
Keep the business name, contact details and service information current across your website and business listings. Review your Google Business Profile when those details change. Consistent information helps people recognise the business behind the page.
Make important information available as readable text and connect related pages with useful internal links. Google’s AI-search guidance includes crawl access, textual content, page experience and accurate business information among its SEO foundations. See Google’s practical checklist.
For ChatGPT search, OpenAI also publishes guidance on its search crawler. A technical review can check that search services can reach the pages you want customers to find.
Measure the path to agreed work
Choose a small set of questions that prospective customers actually ask. For the gardener, these might cover regular garden maintenance in Ennis, what a visit includes and how garden waste is handled. Record the question, the assistant, the date, whether your business appears and which pages are linked. Repeat the same questions over time to see how the answers change.
Review referral visits from AI services where your analytics can identify them. Ask new customers how they found you, then connect that answer with the enquiries that become agreed work. Google includes traffic from its AI search features within the overall Web performance report in Search Console. Google explains how this traffic is measured.
Together, those checks help you decide which information to improve. If people reach your service page but keep asking the same question, add a clear answer. If the offer has changed, update the page and your listings. Build on what customers need to know.
Red Stag Studio brings website design and launch, basic on-page SEO and ongoing website care together. We organise pages around your services and your customers’ questions, with a clear route to get in touch. You can see what our managed website package includes or send us your brief below.