Generative Engine Optimisation, Before You Hire a GEO Agency
A GEO agency sells generative engine optimisation: the work of getting your business quoted inside AI answers, in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and the rest. The honest version is that you rarely need a separate retainer for it, because most of the work is good SEO done properly. This page explains the job in plain English so you can decide for yourself.
What Generative Engine Optimisation Actually Means
The short version: making your site easy for a machine to read, understand and quote.
Generative engine optimisation is the work of making your website easy for an AI assistant to find, read and quote. A generative engine is any system that writes you an answer instead of handing back a list of links. ChatGPT is one. So are Google's AI Overviews, Google's AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.
The name is young. It comes from a 2023 research paper that needed a label for optimising towards systems which generate answers rather than rank pages. The label stuck, and then the marketing industry picked it up and ran with it.
This page is an explainer and not a pitch. The service, the scope and the price sit on our AI SEO agency page instead. Here we are only trying to write the clearest description of the term you will find in British English.
Why you are probably reading this
Most people arrive for one of two reasons. Either an agency has quoted them for GEO and they want to know what they would be buying, or a competitor started showing up in AI answers and they did not. Both are fair reasons to want a straight explanation before anyone spends anything.
There is usually a third worry underneath. Business owners think a whole new discipline appeared overnight while they were busy, and that they have already fallen behind. That is not quite what happened, so the next section unpicks it.
GEO, AEO, AI SEO And LLMO Are Mostly One Thing
Four labels, four people who wanted to own a word, and one practice underneath every GEO agency.
GEO, AEO, AI SEO and LLMO are four names for a practice that is largely a single thing. Each was coined at a different moment by someone who hoped their word would win. None of them is a governed standard, and no exam exists.
- GEO is generative engine optimisation, from the 2023 paper. The most technical-sounding of the four.
- AEO is answer engine optimisation. Older, coined when Google's answer boxes mattered, then reused for AI.
- AI SEO is the plain umbrella phrase, and the one most UK businesses actually type into a search box.
- LLMO is large language model optimisation. Rare, and usually just a synonym for the other three.
Ask five agencies to separate them and you will get five different answers. That is not because the agencies are careless. It is because there is nothing official to be careless about.
Why the jargon costs money
A practice with four names can be sold four times. So if someone quotes you for SEO and then quotes you again for generative engine optimisation, ask what sits inside each line. Two lists will come back, and most of the items on them will match.
That does not make anyone a fraud. Some of the work really is additional, and we set it out further down. But you should know which parts are genuinely new before you agree to pay for them twice.
How A Generative Engine Decides What To Quote
It searches, then it writes. Generative engine optimisation is about influencing the search step.
An assistant answers in two steps. First it searches, then it writes, and the search happens fresh every single time.
Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity about something current and it runs a query, fetches a small number of pages, and builds its answer out of what those pages actually say. Researchers call this retrieval-augmented generation. In plain terms, the machine reads before it answers.
So there is no position four to defend here. Nothing is held. The same question asked twice can pull different sources, because the fetch runs again and the web has moved on since. That unsettles people who are used to watching a ranking, and it probably should.
What tends to get pulled in
- Pages that answer the exact question near the top, in a sentence somebody could lift out whole.
- Plain facts. A price, a date, an address, a qualification, stated rather than implied.
- Pages a crawler can reach and read without running a pile of JavaScript first.
- Claims that agree with what other reputable sites already say about you.
None of that is exotic, which is the reassuring part of the whole subject. It is what you would do anyway for a human reader in a hurry. Our guide on how to appear in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews walks the same ground with worked examples.
Training Bots And Retrieval Bots Are Not The Same Thing
This is the genuinely new part, and the part most articles get wrong.
Crawler permissions are the one part of generative engine optimisation with no real equivalent in classic SEO. Each AI company runs more than one crawler, and the crawlers do different jobs. Confusing them is the most expensive mistake in this subject.
A training crawler collects pages that might go into the next version of a model, months or years ahead. A retrieval crawler fetches your page today, to help answer a question somebody is asking right now. Blocking one does not block the other.
OpenAI documents GPTBot for training and OAI-SearchBot for ChatGPT's search results, plus ChatGPT-User for a live fetch a person has triggered. Its bot documentation states that each setting is independent, so you may allow one and refuse another.
Anthropic splits it the same way. ClaudeBot gathers training data, while Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot fetch pages to answer questions. Perplexity runs PerplexityBot and Perplexity-User, and says neither feeds a foundation model, because Perplexity does not build one.
The upshot is worth saying twice. You can refuse to feed model training and still be quoted in answers, because those are separate switches.
Google is different, and one popular claim about it is false
Google-Extended is not a crawler. It is a token you put in robots.txt, and all the fetching is still done by ordinary Googlebot. It gates two later uses of pages Google already holds: training future Gemini models, and grounding answers in Gemini apps and the Vertex AI API.
Google's own crawler documentation says AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search are unaffected by it. So blocking Google-Extended does not take you out of AI Overviews, and it never did. If a proposal claims otherwise, open the documentation while they are still on the call.
What Is Genuinely New, And What Is Old Work Renamed
Three real changes. After that, a GEO agency is selling technical SEO in a new coat.
Three things about search have honestly changed. Everything else on the average GEO checklist is work this trade has been doing for years.
What is genuinely new
- You compete to be quoted, not to be placed. There is no stable slot to hold, so the aim is being the source an answer leans on.
- Often there is no click at all. Someone reads the answer and never visits you, so the mention itself carries value your traffic report cannot show.
- Permission is now a setting. Who may read your site is something you decide in a text file, and getting it wrong fails silently.
What is old work under a new name
Fast pages. Clean HTML that does not need JavaScript to show its own text. Structured data, so a machine can tell a price from a phone number. Headings that match the questions people actually ask. Business facts that agree with each other wherever they appear.
All of that was good technical SEO in 2015, and it is generative engine optimisation in 2026. We published a technical teardown of a large UK healthcare site, and nearly every fault in it would also stop an assistant reading those pages properly. Same faults, same fixes, one bill.
So the useful question is not whether you are doing GEO. It is whether your ordinary SEO work already covers the boring technical ground, because that is where most of the answer lives.
What Generative Engine Optimisation Looks Like In Practice
Four jobs, in order. None of them exotic, and any GEO agency worth paying can show you all four.
Generative engine optimisation, done honestly, is a short list of jobs done properly. Here is the whole thing, in the order we would work through it.
First, check who is allowed to read you. Open your robots.txt and go through it line by line. Plenty of sites blocked every AI bot in 2023, in a panic, and quietly opted out of ever being quoted.
Second, answer the question on the page. Put the direct answer in the first two sentences under each heading, phrased so a machine could quote it without editing. Then explain underneath, at whatever length the subject deserves.
Third, label the facts. Structured data is a small block of code that tells a machine which number is a price, which is a rating and which is a phone number. Guessing is where wrong answers come from.
Fourth, make your facts agree. Your address, hours and services should match on your site, on your Google listing, on Companies House and on any directory that has you. Contradictions make a model hedge or skip you.
Those four jobs are the practical core of generative engine optimisation. Anything a proposal adds on top should be justified line by line.
What we would not bother with
Writing copy stuffed with phrases aimed at robots. Buying a monitoring tool before anyone knows the baseline. Rebuilding a site that already reads clearly. Those show up in proposals often, though they rarely earn their place.
Check the permissions
Read your robots.txt line by line. Confirm the retrieval bots are allowed, then decide separately whether training crawlers may collect you at all.
Answer at the top
Put the direct answer in the first two sentences under each heading, in words a person or a machine could quote without editing them.
Make the facts checkable
Label prices, hours, reviews and questions in your code, then make sure the same details appear the same way everywhere else online.
Do You Need A Separate GEO Agency?
For most UK businesses, no. Here is the honest version of what a GEO agency is really selling.
For most businesses the answer is no. If your search work already covers technical health, clear writing and consistent business facts, then generative engine optimisation is a handful of extra checks on top. It is not a second programme with a second fee.
There are real exceptions. A site with an awkward crawl setup, a business whose details differ across a dozen directories, or a company in a field where assistants get things dangerously wrong. Those cases need proper hours. Most do not.
What we would actually suggest
Start by finding out where you stand today. Our AI visibility audit tests what the assistants currently say about you and hands you the findings. If you want that watched over time instead, LLM visibility tracking is the ongoing version.
If you would rather someone did the work, that is our AI SEO agency service. It starts at £495 a month, rolling monthly, with no lock-in, and the AI work sits inside it rather than beside it. The wider picture lives on our AI search optimisation page, while our guide to what SEO costs in the UK explains what moves the number up or down.
And if you read all this and decide you need none of it, that is a perfectly good outcome. We would rather you left understanding the subject than bought something you did not need.
We cannot promise you a citation, and neither can anyone else
No agency, tool or consultant can guarantee that ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews will quote your business. The systems change without notice, and the same question can return different sources an hour apart. We will not sell you a guarantee, and we would treat one on someone else's proposal as a reason to walk away.
Related: AI SEO agency · AI search optimisation · AI visibility audit · LLM visibility tracking
Questions About Generative Engine Optimisation
The six we get asked most, answered without hedging.
What does generative engine optimisation mean?
Generative engine optimisation means making your website easy for AI systems to find, read and quote when they answer somebody's question. A generative engine writes an answer instead of listing links, so ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Gemini and Copilot all count. The term comes from a 2023 research paper and spread from there.
Is generative engine optimisation different from SEO?
Partly. The goal changes, because you are trying to be quoted inside an answer rather than to hold a place in a list of links. The work mostly does not change: fast pages, clean code, structured data, clear writing and business facts that agree with each other. Treat it as a few extra checks on top of good SEO, not a separate trade, and that is why most businesses do not need a separate GEO agency.
Is GEO the same as AEO, answer engine optimisation?
In practice, yes. AEO stands for answer engine optimisation and predates GEO, but agencies now use the two almost interchangeably, along with AI SEO and LLMO. No standards body decides the difference. If a GEO agency charges you separately for GEO and AEO, ask to see what sits inside each line.
More questions about GEO and AI crawlers
Does blocking AI crawlers help or hurt me?
It depends which bot you block. OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity each run separate documented crawlers for training and for fetching pages to answer questions, so you can refuse training and still be quoted. Blocking the retrieval bots takes you out of those answers, and that is the most common mistake in generative engine optimisation. Blocking Google-Extended does not affect AI Overviews at all, because Google's own documentation says AI Overviews run on ordinary Googlebot data.
Do you sell generative engine optimisation as a stand-alone service?
No. The work sits inside our AI SEO agency service, which starts at £495 a month, rolling monthly, with no lock-in. Setting up as a separate GEO agency would mean charging twice for technical work that overlaps with ordinary SEO. If you only want a diagnosis first, the AI visibility audit is the one-off version.
Can you guarantee ChatGPT will mention my business?
No, and nobody honestly can. Assistants choose their sources fresh for every question, and the same question can return different sources an hour later. What we can do is remove the reasons a page gets skipped, then measure what changes. If an agency offers you a citation guarantee, ask them to put it in the contract and watch what happens.
Ask us the awkward question
If a GEO agency has quoted you for generative engine optimisation, send us the quote and your website. We will tell you plainly which parts are genuinely new work and which parts you are probably already paying for.
Raoul (Alex) Müller
Email: office@digitalmovement.uk
Phone: +44 7865 064463