Generative Engine Optimisation is the practice of getting your business named and cited inside AI-generated answers, the responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Google AI Overviews, instead of ranked as a blue link.
Across UC's 146-article Australian corpus audit, 0% of audited non-UC sites carried a labelled Quick Answer block at the top of the page, the single feature AI engines lift most cleanly as a citation.
GEO and SEO want the same thing, to be the source people trust, but they reward different things. Classic SEO chases position one on a page of ten links: backlinks, exact-match anchor text, domain age. A generative engine never shows that page. It reads dozens of sources, writes one answer, and names two or three businesses inside it. So GEO optimises for being quotable: a direct answer in the first two sentences of a section, structured data the model can lift cleanly, dense and consistent mentions of your entity (business name, suburb, service), and citations from sources the model already trusts. The term comes from a 2024 research paper by Aggarwal and colleagues at Princeton, Georgia Tech and IIT Delhi, who found content tuned for those signals can lift visibility in generative answers by up to 40%. It overlaps heavily with Answer Engine Optimisation and sits under the broader discipline of AI Search Optimisation. Our full GEO explainer for Australian businesses walks through the playbook end to end.
Here is what it looks like in practice. Open ChatGPT and ask "who are the best buyers agents in Melbourne". You get a shortlist of three or four firms, stitched together from web sources, and the rest of the market is invisible. A buyer reads that list and calls one of them. If your buyers agency is not on it, the enquiry never reaches you, the model made that call before you got a vote. The fix is the same one we run for clients in that position: question-format headings, extractable answers, schema.org markup, suburb-level proof, and tier-one citations the engine respects. We walk that method through end to end in How to Rank a Melbourne Buyers Agency on AI Search.
This matters now because the traffic is moving. Gartner expects traditional search volume to fall 25% by 2026 as people ask chatbots instead of typing queries. Most Australian SEO agencies have not changed a thing in response. That gap is the opening, and it's what our SEO & AI Visibility service is built around.