GEO: getting cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity, the new SEO

A growing share of business buyers start their research by asking an AI assistant — « which providers do X », « how much does Y cost » — before they ever type a query into Google. If the assistant answers with your competitors, the deal starts without you. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the discipline of making your company citable in those answers. It resembles SEO, with one twist: you are convincing a reader that quotes, not a ranker that lists.

How assistants pick their sources

When an assistant browses to answer, it looks for pages it can safely quote: clear claims, verifiable facts, named methods, recent dates. Adjective-heavy marketing copy gives a language model nothing to extract. A page that states what you do, for whom, at what price, with which method, gives it a ready-made citation. Assistants also lean on third-party mentions — directories, comparisons, press — so your presence off your own site counts too.

What to publish to become citable

• →Factual pages with numbers: real prices, real timelines, real scope — the exact things marketing pages usually hide are the things assistants quote.
• →Dated use cases: anonymised but concrete stories with a before, an after, and a date, so the assistant can present them as evidence.
• →Published methodologies: explaining how you measure or deliver — openly enough to be challenged — is the strongest citability signal a company can emit.
• →Direct answers to buyer questions: one page per real question (« how much does X cost », « X or Y? »), with the answer in the first paragraph.

Classic SEO remains the foundation

GEO does not replace SEO — assistants find pages through the same crawling and the same signals search engines use. Clean structure, fast pages, real inbound links and consistent publishing remain prerequisites. Think of GEO as writing for a very literal, very well-read reader who only quotes what is verifiable.

The test to run today: ask two or three AI assistants the questions your buyers would ask — « best providers for X in France », « how much does X cost ». Note who gets cited and which pages the answers rely on. That transcript is your GEO roadmap: every question where you are absent is a page to write, in the factual format above.