What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

Why GEO matters now

Roughly six in ten people now start a search with an AI tool rather than a traditional search engine. Google AI Overviews appear above the standard results on more than half of all Google searches. ChatGPT alone handles billions of queries each month, and a growing share of those queries are the same ones people used to type into Google: best accountant near me, plumber in Brunswick, which CRM is right for a small Australian business.

The shift isn't subtle. It's a fundamental change in how customers find suppliers. And it has a quiet consequence most businesses haven't caught up with yet: being ranked in Google no longer guarantees being mentioned by the AI. Those are now two different games, with two different rulebooks.

GEO is the rulebook for the second game.

SEO vs GEO: what actually changes

The clearest way to understand GEO is to put it side-by-side with the SEO most businesses already know.

The two aren't enemies. Good SEO still helps. But a lot of the work that wins traditional rankings — long pages padded with keywords, generic introductions, hedged language designed to cover every angle — actively hurts your chances of being cited by an AI.

SEO rewards comprehensive answers. GEO rewards clear ones.

How AI search actually decides who gets cited

Every major AI search engine runs on a process called Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). It works in five steps:

1. Expansion. Your question is broken into several sub-questions. "Best plumber in Brunswick" might become five separate queries about ratings, pricing, response times, services offered, and local reputation.
2. Routing. Each sub-question is sent off to different sources — sometimes a live web search, sometimes the model's training data, sometimes specific authoritative sites like Google Maps or government registers.
3. Retrieval. A shortlist of candidate pages is pulled together. This pool can run to dozens of pages per query.
4. Selection. The AI looks at each candidate and asks: can I lift a clean, verifiable, useful sentence out of this page? Only the pages that pass become citations.
5. Synthesis. The cited passages are rewritten into a single coherent answer.

The selection step is where most businesses lose. A page can survive expansion, routing, and retrieval — meaning the AI found it — and still fail to be cited because the content is too vague, too padded, or too structurally messy for the AI to extract a usable answer.

Three things consistently decide whether selection succeeds:

1. Retrievability

The AI's crawler has to be able to reach your page, render it, and read it. Sites that block AI user agents, rely heavily on JavaScript without server-side rendering, or sit behind aggressive bot protection often fail at this first step. They are invisible before the conversation even starts.

2. Extractability

The page has to contain a clean, declarative answer the AI can isolate. Pages built around opening questions with direct answers, clear headings, defined terms, and short paragraphs get extracted. Pages built around flowing narrative prose, marketing waffle, and hedged language often don't — even when the information is technically there.

3. Trust

The AI looks for signals that your content is worth citing: a named author, verifiable credentials, links to primary sources, a clearly defined business entity, and corroboration from other trusted sites. This is where off-site presence — your Google Business Profile, your LinkedIn, mentions in industry publications, customer reviews — does more work than most business owners realise.

What GEO work actually looks like

GEO isn't a single fix. It's a set of changes across six dimensions, and most websites are weak on at least three of them. At AnswerLab, those six dimensions form the backbone of every GEO Report we produce.

Where Australian businesses lose ground

Most AI models were trained primarily on US data. That creates a structural blind spot for Australian businesses: an Australian plumber, accountant, or café is competing against a wall of US-centric content unless the local signals are strong enough to override that default.

The Australian businesses winning AI citation share a few traits:

• A clean, verified Google Business Profile with consistent NAP (name, address, phone) details across the web.
• Genuine local content — suburb names, service areas, and city-specific context written into the page in natural language, not stuffed into footers.
• Reviews with substance — long-form reviews that mention specific services and locations carry far more weight than star counts.
• AU-recognised authority signals — mentions in .com.au publications, industry associations, and government registers where applicable.

The bottom line

GEO is not a rebrand of SEO. It's a different discipline, optimising for a different machine, with a different end-state. The discipline rewards businesses that explain what they do clearly, prove they're real, and make it easy for an AI to lift a useful sentence out of their site.

The good news: most Australian businesses haven't started yet. The first movers in any given industry are getting cited disproportionately, and citation tends to compound — once an AI starts mentioning you, it learns to mention you more.

The bad news: the gap between businesses that have done GEO work and those that haven't is widening every month. Waiting is expensive in a way that's invisible until a competitor's name is the one AI keeps suggesting.