Short answer

Generative engine optimization is the work of getting your company retrieved, understood and cited by AI assistants when a buyer asks them a question you sell the answer to. It shares its technical base with SEO — crawlability, structure, authority — and departs from it in three specific places: answer-first page structure, a single consistent entity across the whole site, and facts stated concretely enough that a model can quote them without hedging.

What changed, precisely

The search result page did not get worse. It got skipped. When someone asks an assistant "who supplies three-phase inverters in Poland with under four weeks lead time," they are handed a paragraph naming two or three companies. There is no page two. There is no position eleven. You are either in the paragraph or you do not exist for that question.

That shifts what optimization means. Ranking was a competition for attention among ten visible options. Citation is a filter: the model retrieves a handful of documents it can reach and parse, discards the ones that contradict themselves or say nothing specific, and composes from what is left. Most of the losses happen at the retrieval and parsing stage, before quality is ever considered — which is oddly good news, because those failures are cheap to fix.

Check your own site before you read our pitch

These eight items cover most of what decides whether a B2B page gets used as a source. Tick what is honestly true today. The score is weighted — the technical items count for more because they are pass-or-fail rather than gradual.

GEO readiness, self-assessed

What the work actually consists of

1. Retrievability, first and non-negotiable

Several of the crawlers that feed assistant answers do not execute JavaScript, or execute it with a budget so small that a heavy single-page app returns an empty shell. If your product copy only exists after hydration, you are invisible to those systems no matter how good the copy is. We check what each crawler actually receives, fix the rendering path, and confirm with a fetch rather than an assumption. This is usually the single largest jump, and it is measured in days.

2. Answer-first structure

A model composing an answer wants a self-contained passage it can lift. Pages that open with a value proposition and reach the substance in paragraph nine lose to pages that state the answer in the first eighty words and then justify it. This is not dumbing down — the depth stays, it just moves behind the answer instead of in front of it. Every page we build carries a marked quick-answer block for exactly this reason, including the one you are reading.

3. One entity, stated the same way everywhere

This is the item most agencies skip because it is invisible without tooling. If your company is described with a slightly different name, a different set of social profiles and a different founder on forty pages, search engines and models resolve that into several weak entities instead of one strong one. Consolidating it is unglamorous — a single identifier, one canonical set of facts, no contradictions — and it changes how confidently a model will name you. We wrote the long version in entity SEO and the knowledge graph.

4. Specifics a model can safely quote

Assistants hedge on vague claims and repeat concrete ones. "Fast delivery" is unquotable. "Ships in four to six weeks from a warehouse in Rotterdam" is quotable. Prices, lead times, capacities, certifications, the size of the team, what you do not do — these are the sentences that end up in answers. Most B2B sites have this information and keep it in a PDF.

5. Presence on things you do not own

Models weight corroboration. A claim that appears only on your own domain is treated as a claim; the same claim on a trade directory, a partner site, a supplier list and a press mention becomes a fact. This is the slowest part of the work and the part with the longest half-life, which is why we start it in month one rather than month four.

6. Machine-readable context

An llms.txt file stating who you are, what you sell, what it costs and where you operate gives assistants a clean summary instead of making them reconstruct one from your navigation. It is not a magic ranking file and nobody should sell it as one. It is cheap, it removes ambiguity, and when a model does read it, it reads exactly what you wrote. Ours is at /llms.txt if you want to see the shape.

How we measure it, since rank tracking no longer covers it

Prompt panels
A fixed set of buyer questions asked across several assistants on a schedule, logged over time
Assistant traffic
Referrals from AI surfaces, separated out in analytics instead of buried in direct
Retrievability
What each crawler actually receives, re-checked after every deployment

None of these is a rank. All three move before revenue does, which is the point of a leading indicator. Classic organic positions keep being tracked as well, because the two systems still share most of their inputs and a page that wins citations usually wins rankings a few weeks later.

Who this is not for

  • Anyone who needs results this quarter. Retrievability is fast; authority is not. If you need pipeline in six weeks, spend that money on converting the inquiries you already get and start GEO in parallel.
  • Sites with no commercial pages worth ranking. If everything is a blog post and there is nothing to buy, there is nothing to cite. We would rebuild the service pages first.
  • Companies that want a guaranteed number of citations. Nobody can promise that, and the ones who do are describing branded queries you already own.

Scope, price and the honest entry point

GEO is part of the SEO, GEO & Demand Capture retainer, which starts at $2,750 a month and runs as continuous work rather than a project with an end date. Before any of that, the $750 audit covers retrievability, entity consistency and a prompt-panel baseline, so the decision is made on evidence. The full list of what things cost is on the pricing page, and there is a free analyzer that runs a shallower version of the same checks in about a minute without talking to anyone.

Frequently asked questions

What is generative engine optimization, in plain terms?
Generative engine optimization is the work of making a company retrievable and quotable by the systems that now answer buyer questions directly — ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini. Classic SEO competes for a click on a list of ten blue links. GEO competes to be the source a model reads when it composes the answer instead of showing that list. The mechanics overlap about sixty percent; the part that does not overlap is where most B2B sites are currently invisible.

Is GEO just SEO with a new name?
No, and the difference is testable. A page can rank third for a query and never be cited in the AI answer for the same query, because the model retrieved three other sources it found easier to parse and easier to trust. What changes the outcome is structure — a direct answer near the top of the page, clean entity markup, consistent facts across the whole site, and content that reads like a source rather than an ad. Those are real edits with real effects, not a rebranding.

How do you measure something with no rank tracker?
Three ways, and we set all three up before touching the content. First, prompt panels: a fixed set of buyer questions asked across several assistants on a schedule, logged so you can see whether you appear and what you appear next to. Second, referral and assistant traffic in analytics, which is small but growing and tells you something rank never did. Third, the retrievability audit itself — whether your pages are even reachable and parseable by the crawlers these systems use, which is a yes-or-no question with a yes-or-no fix.

Do we need to change the whole website?
Usually not. The typical B2B site needs work on six to twelve commercial pages, one consistent entity layer across all of them, and a technical fix or two — most often a rendering problem where the content only exists after JavaScript runs, which several assistant crawlers do not wait for. The rest of the archive can stay as it is. We start with the pages that already get impressions, because moving something from position forty to position eight is cheaper than creating demand from nothing.

How long before anything moves?
Retrievability fixes show up in days, because they are binary — a crawler either sees the page or it does not. Entity consolidation takes a few weeks to be reflected. Ranking and citation changes on commercial queries realistically take two to four months in B2B, and anyone promising faster is describing branded queries you already own. We report on leading indicators monthly so you are not sitting in the dark waiting for the lagging ones.

What does it cost and can we start small?
Demand capture with GEO built in runs from $2,750 a month, and it is a retainer because the work is continuous rather than a one-time fix. The smaller entry point is the $750 audit, which includes a retrievability check and a prompt-panel baseline, so you can see where you actually stand before committing to anything monthly. The free analyzer on this site covers a shallower version of the same checks in about a minute.

Go deeper

LLM SEO and GEO for B2B How to appear in AI answers Entity SEO and the knowledge graph Why ChatGPT cannot see your site AEO and zero-click search RAG without hallucinations Building an SEO cluster without spam Programmatic SEO, where it hurts Which queries matter in long cycles Separating noise from money keywords