A growing share of buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Perplexity before they open Google, and Google now answers many queries in an AI Overview above the results. Those answers name a handful of businesses. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), also called answer engine optimisation (AEO), AI SEO or LLM SEO, is the work of being one of them.
Not much in practice. The three names overlap heavily and are used interchangeably by agencies and buyers, so this page covers all of them. The differences are in emphasis.
Getting your business named and cited inside answers written by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.
Structuring pages so search features and assistants can lift a direct answer, including Google AI Overviews and featured snippets.
Broader labels for the same work: AI search optimisation across every surface where an AI answers instead of listing links.
When an AI answers the question directly, the user often never scrolls to the results. Whoever gets named in that answer takes the consideration, and everyone else is invisible regardless of position. The same thing happens inside Google, where an AI Overview sits above the first organic result and cites a small set of sources.
This is not a replacement for SEO. The technical foundation and content quality that earns rankings is most of what makes a page quotable. AI search optimisation is the layer on top: making sure a machine can extract a correct answer from your site, and that everything it reads about you elsewhere agrees.
It is also early. Very few businesses in the UAE are working on this deliberately, which makes the ground cheaper to take now than it will be in a year.
AI answers vary between users and between runs, so a single position number would be dishonest. The reporting is built on repeated sampling of the prompts your buyers actually use.
Across a fixed prompt set, how often you are named versus each competitor. The headline number, tracked month over month.
How often your pages are linked as a source, and which pages earn it. Tells you what to write more of.
What the assistants say you do, and whether it matches reality. Wrong descriptions cost more than absence.
Sessions arriving from ChatGPT, Perplexity and the rest, separated out in analytics so the trend is visible.
Anyone promising you a guaranteed position in ChatGPT does not understand how it works. What can be influenced is how often you appear and how accurately you are described.
The longer the consideration, the more likely someone asks an AI to shortlist options first. That is where being named early decides who gets contacted.
Your site has unresolved technical problems, thin content or no rankings to speak of. GEO builds on those foundations rather than substituting for them, so the money goes further on ordinary SEO first. I will say so on the call if that is where you are.
Start with the SEO services →They overlap heavily and are often used interchangeably. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is about being named and cited inside answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity. AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) is about structuring content so search features and assistants can lift a direct answer, including Google AI Overviews and featured snippets. AI SEO and LLM SEO are broader labels for the same work. This page covers all of them.
It overlaps heavily but it is not the same. Most of the foundation is shared: crawlable pages, accurate structured data, content that answers the question. What is different is the goal. SEO optimises for a position in a list. GEO optimises for being extracted and named inside an answer, which rewards clarity and off-site consensus more than it rewards keywords.
No, and nobody can. Answers vary between users, between models and between runs, and none of the providers expose a ranking system to optimise against. What can be moved is how often you appear across a tracked set of prompts, and how accurately you are described when you do.
Schema and content fixes can change AI Overviews within weeks, because they run on Google's index. Model-based answers move more slowly, usually a few months, because they depend on your presence across the wider web catching up.
Increasingly yes, and it is cheaper if your SEO is already working. A site with solid rankings and clean technical foundations is most of the way there, so GEO becomes a matter of structure, entity accuracy and off-site presence rather than a rebuild.
That is common and worth fixing first. It usually traces back to outdated directory entries, an old profile, or a page on your own site that contradicts another. Correcting the sources is slower than correcting a page, but it is the only thing that works.
Yes, and the local angle helps. Assistants asked for a recommendation in Dubai lean on regional directories, reviews and Business Profiles, which is a smaller pool to compete in than a global query.
Book a free 30-minute call. I will run your commercial prompts through the main assistants beforehand and show you what comes back, including who gets named instead of you.