- GEO means making your business easy for AI assistants to find, understand and cite.
- AI answers draw on clear, factual, well-structured pages, often from many sources.
- The basics are content that answers real questions, structured data, and consistent facts across the web.
When a manager asks ChatGPT, Perplexity or Google's AI Overviews "which firms in Hong Kong help companies hire AI talent?", the answer names a handful of companies. Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the work of making sure your company is one of them.
How AI assistants build an answer
They search or recall a set of sources, read them, and summarise. Pages that state facts plainly, answer the question directly and are consistent with other sources are more likely to be used. Vague marketing language and content hidden behind scripts or images is easy to skip.
How GEO differs from SEO
Traditional SEO aims for a high ranking on a results page. GEO aims to be quoted inside an answer. The two overlap heavily: both need crawlable pages, good structure and authority. GEO puts extra weight on direct answers, factual claims, and clear entity information such as who you are, where you operate and what you offer.
What businesses can do
- Answer real questions: publish pages and articles that answer what customers ask, in their words.
- State facts clearly: services, locations, prices or fee structures, processes, timelines.
- Use structured data: schema.org markup for your organisation, services, articles and FAQs.
- Be consistent: the same name, address and description across your site, directories and profiles.
- Allow AI crawlers: check that robots.txt does not block the assistants you want to appear in.
- Publish in every language your customers use: separate, crawlable pages for English and Chinese.
Measuring GEO
Ask the main AI assistants the questions your customers ask and record whether, and how, your company appears. Repeat monthly. See our GEO checklist for company websites for the practical steps.
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