GEO 101: How to Get Your Website Cited by ChatGPT & Google AI Overviews

If you've asked ChatGPT or Google's AI Overviews a question in your industry recently, you've already seen the shift: the answer isn't a list of ten blue links anymore — it's a single, synthesized response, sometimes with a brand name or two mentioned inside it. Getting your business to be one of those names is what Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is about.

What GEO Actually Means

Traditional SEO optimises for a ranked position in search results. GEO optimises for something different: being referenced or cited inside the AI-generated answer itself — in ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity.

The shift matters because these AI answer surfaces increasingly are the search experience for a growing share of queries, especially informational and comparison ones. A ranking on page one doesn't help if the searcher never scrolls past the AI summary at the top.

How AI Models Decide What to Cite

AI models don't cite sources randomly. Across the platforms, five signals consistently show up as decisive:

1. Entity authority — is your brand a recognised entity in knowledge graphs and AI training data, not just a domain name?

2. Content clarity — does your content give clear, factual, directly extractable answers, rather than burying the point in marketing language?

3. Source credibility — do other authoritative sites reference and validate your claims?

4. Structured data — is your content machine-readable, with schema that makes claims, authorship, and organization identity explicit?

5. Consistent presence — is your brand represented the same way across your site, directories, social profiles, and third-party mentions?

None of these alone guarantees a citation. Together, they're what separates brands AI models trust enough to quote from brands they simply ignore.

Where to Start

If you're beginning from zero, the highest-leverage first moves are:

• Build a real author entity. A generic "Team" byline gives AI models nothing to anchor authority to. A named author with a bio, credentials, and a consistent presence across your content is a trust signal AI models can actually use.
• Structure content for extraction. Lead with the direct answer, use clear headings, and back claims with specific data rather than generic advice — the kind of content AI models can lift a sentence from cleanly.
• Add the right schema. FAQPage, Article, Person, and Organization schema make the relationships between your content, its author, and your brand explicit to machines reading the page.
• Earn third-party validation. Citations, mentions, and backlinks from credible sources remain one of the strongest signals that a brand is safe to reference.

How to Measure GEO Progress

Since there's no "GEO ranking report" the way there's a keyword ranking report, measurement is more manual for now:

• Run your priority topic queries directly against ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews on a regular cadence and log whether your brand appears.
• Track referral traffic from AI platforms in your analytics — Perplexity and ChatGPT increasingly send clicks, and that traffic is attributable.
• Watch competitor mentions on the same queries — if a competitor is consistently cited and you aren't, that's a content or authority gap to close.

The Honest Caveat

No one can guarantee a specific AI citation — the models update independently and without notice, and there's no paid placement mechanism the way there is with ads. What GEO work does is build the conditions — authority, structure, clarity — that make citation more likely over time. Treat it as a compounding investment, not a switch you flip.

If you want a structured GEO strategy built for your business rather than piecing this together yourself, see our GEO services page for how we approach entity optimisation, AI query mapping, and citation tracking.