What GEO actually means — and what it can't measure

When someone asks an AI assistant to recommend a business, the assistant picks its own sources. That shift has created a new acronym — GEO, Generative Engine Optimisation — and a lot of confident claims about controlling it.

Let's separate the real from the marketing.

What actually influences an AI answer

An assistant grounding its answer in web results responds to the same signals a search engine uses, plus a few of its own:

• Entity clarity. Is it obvious who the business is, what it sells, and where it operates?
• Factual consistency. Does the site say the same thing about opening hours, service area and pricing everywhere?
• Answer-shaped content. A page that directly answers a question is easier to quote than a page that circles it.
• Structured data. Schema does not guarantee a citation, but it removes ambiguity.
• Corroboration. Mentions on other credible sites make claims easier to trust.

None of that is new. GEO is largely good technical and content work, aimed at a different consumer of the same signals.

What cannot be measured

ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI surfaces do not publish per-website analytics. There is no dashboard showing how many AI answers cited your site last month. Anyone who shows you a number like that is either inferring it or inventing it.

What can be measured, honestly

You can sample. Ask a fixed set of questions, through a web-grounded model, on a schedule, and record whether the business appears in the sources. That produces a real, repeatable observation: on 14 October, in 4 of 9 sampled answers, this brand was mentioned.

It is not an impression count. It is a sample, and it should always be called one.

The practical work

If you want to improve your odds of being cited:

1. Write one clear page per question your customers actually ask.
2. Keep business information identical across your site and your profiles.
3. Add LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage schema where they are truthful.
4. Publish authored content with a named human and a real date.
5. Remove or update pages that are now wrong.

That is the whole discipline. It is unglamorous, and it is more likely to work than any promise of a guaranteed citation.