AI search optimisation is how your brand gets cited, recommended and trusted by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini.
For decades, search meant ten blue links. You optimised for Google, ranked well, got clicks. That model is disintegrating. AI engines now handle the answer themselves — synthesising information from across the web and delivering it directly to the user, without them ever needing to visit a site.
Being cited in an AI response is the new equivalent of ranking number one. When ChatGPT answers a question about your industry, the brands it names are the ones that win — whether or not the user clicks anything. Your competitors are already working to be those brands. Generative Engine Optimisation is how you get there first.
GEO is the discipline of optimising your brand's content, structure, authority and digital presence so that AI engines choose to cite, quote and recommend you — across every platform where your potential customers are searching.
This breakdown shows exactly how Generative Engine Optimisation works in practice — and why brands that don't adapt will be invisible to the next generation of search.
How AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews decide who to cite — and how GEO puts your brand in the answer.
We run a comprehensive audit measuring your brand's current citation rate, sentiment, positioning and mention frequency across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot and Google AI Overviews. You can't optimise what you don't measure.
Your AI Visibility Audit begins with a structured measurement programme. We compile a standardised prompt set covering your industry, product or service categories, competitor comparisons and buying-intent queries — the exact questions your target customers are asking AI tools right now. We then run those prompts systematically across every major AI platform and record whether your brand appears, where it appears, and how it's described.
The result is a precise baseline: your current AI visibility score by platform, a sentiment breakdown of how AI talks about your brand, and a side-by-side comparison with your top competitors. This isn't a vanity report — it's the strategic foundation everything else is built on. The audit identifies the highest-impact actions in your sector and tells us exactly what to prioritise.
AI engines don't rank pages — they cite sources they trust. We restructure and rewrite your content so it answers the exact questions AI users ask, in the format AI engines can extract and cite cleanly.
AI engines are trained on vast amounts of text, but when they generate responses they draw primarily from content that is clearly structured, factually precise, and written around specific questions. Generic brand copy — however polished — is rarely cited. What gets cited is content that provides a direct, authoritative, clearly attributable answer to a well-defined question. We audit your existing content against that standard and either restructure it or build the pieces that are missing.
Entity building is a parallel workstream. AI models understand the world through entities — named people, places, organisations, and concepts — and the relationships between them. We build your brand's entity footprint systematically, ensuring AI models associate your brand with the right topic areas, expertise signals, and authority indicators. This drives citation rate across every platform simultaneously.
Schema markup is how you communicate directly with AI crawlers. When structured data is missing or wrong, AI engines guess at what your pages mean — and guess wrong.
For traditional SEO, schema markup has always been a ranking enhancer — useful but optional. For GEO, it's foundational. AI language models don't read your website the way a human does. They process machine-readable signals, and structured data is the clearest, most direct signal you can send. Without it, AI engines make inferences about your business that may be incomplete, outdated, or simply wrong — costing you citations and trust.
We audit every page of your site for schema coverage and correctness, identify every error or gap that's actively harming your AI discoverability, and implement the full range of schema types relevant to your business — from Organisation and LocalBusiness at the entity level, through to Product, FAQ, Article and HowTo at the content level. Every type serves a specific function in how AI engines read, understand and choose to cite your site.
| Schema Type | Status | Issues | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organisation Schema | ✓ Active | 2 warnings | Medium |
| Product Schema | ✗ Missing | Not implemented | High |
| Review/Rating Schema | ⚠ Partial | Missing aggregate | High |
| FAQ Schema | ✗ Missing | Not implemented | High |
| Article/Author Schema | ⚠ Partial | No author entity | Medium |
| BreadcrumbList | ✓ Active | None | Low |
AI models learn what's authoritative from the same signals Google does — but weighted differently. High-quality mentions, editorial links and digital PR placements signal credibility to AI engines.
PageRank shaped a decade of SEO thinking: get links, build authority, rank higher. AI authority works on related but distinct principles. AI models are trained on text corpora that include news articles, industry publications, Wikipedia entries, review platforms, podcasts and forums. Brands that appear frequently and positively across those high-authority sources are more likely to be cited — not because of a direct algorithm, but because they're woven into the fabric of the web's most trusted content.
Our authority building programme targets that reality directly. Rather than building links for crawl metrics alone, we build the kind of authoritative presence that gets picked up in training data and cited in responses: earned media coverage, editorial links from specialist publications, brand mentions across high-authority domains, Wikipedia and Knowledge Panel optimisation, and systematic review amplification across platforms AI engines treat as social proof signals.
Google's AI Overviews appear at the top of search results for nearly half of all queries. They pull from a small set of cited sources. We get your pages into those positions.
Google's AI Overviews — the AI-generated summaries that appear above traditional search results — represent the most commercially significant real estate in modern search. When an Overview appears for a query, the cited sources receive a distinct visibility advantage that outweighs almost any traditional ranking position. For high-intent commercial queries, appearing cited in an AI Overview is equivalent to owning the top of the search results page.
Getting into AI Overviews requires a specific, measurable combination of signals: the right content structure, E-E-A-T signals that pass Google's quality thresholds, featured snippet capture on related queries, and proximity to the topics Google has designated as Overview triggers in your space. We reverse-engineer exactly what's being cited and build the content and authority signals needed to displace existing sources or join them.
| Query | In Overview | Cited Source | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| best [service] company UK | ✓ Yes | YourBrand.co.uk | #2 of 3 |
| [industry] software comparison | ✗ No | Competitor A | — |
| how to choose [service] provider | ✗ No | Competitor B | — |
We systematically identify every topic, question and prompt where competitors appear in AI-generated responses and your brand doesn't. That's your entire GEO action list — prioritised.
Competitive gap analysis is the clearest, most actionable form of GEO intelligence available. Rather than theorising about what AI engines want, we directly measure what's working for your competitors and map every gap to a specific action. The methodology is systematic: we compile your full target prompt set, run it across every major platform, record who appears where, and build a gap matrix that shows you exactly which competitors are winning which queries and why.
The gap analysis doesn't just generate a list — it generates a prioritised strategy. Each gap is classified by platform, query intent, commercial value, and the likely difficulty of closing it. That classification drives the content, schema and authority workstreams. When we create a new piece of content, fix a schema implementation, or execute a digital PR campaign, it's because the gap analysis told us that action has the highest expected citation impact for your specific competitive landscape.
| Query | You | Comp A | Comp B | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| best IT support [city] | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | 🔴 High |
| AI security for SMEs | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | 🔴 High |
| GDPR compliance guide UK | ⚠ | ✓ | ✓ | 🟡 Medium |
| what is prompt injection | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | 🟢 Strong |
| cloud security assessment | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | 🟡 Medium |
Traditional SEO and GEO operate by fundamentally different rules. Understanding the difference is the first step to making the right investment.
| Factor | GEO — Generative Engine Optimisation | Traditional SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery mechanism | ||
| Ranking factor | ||
| Visibility format | ||
| Zero-click impact | ||
| Platform coverage | ||
| Content format | ||
| Trust signals | ||
| Measurement | ||
| Future trajectory | ||
| ROI timeline |
We'll run a free AI visibility audit across your top queries and show you exactly where you're being cited — and where competitors are taking your place.
Whether you're starting your GEO journey or looking to accelerate an existing programme, we'll give you a straight assessment of where you stand and a clear picture of what it'll take to move the needle.