What is GEO, and why your website is only part of the answer
Generative engine optimization is about what a model believes your business is. That belief gets assembled from your site plus every other place you show up, and when those sources disagree the model gets vague about you.
Here is an uncomfortable exercise. Open ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever you use and ask it to tell you about your own business by name. Then ask it who it would recommend for the thing you do in your city. Most owners who try this get one of three results, and none of them are good.
Sometimes it describes a version of the business from several years ago. Sometimes it hedges so hard it says nothing useful, along the lines of you appearing to be a company in that general area. And sometimes it names three competitors and not you.
GEO is the work of fixing that, and the part people get wrong is assuming it happens on their website.
Where the description actually comes from
A language model does not look your business up the way a search engine does. It has absorbed an enormous amount of text, and when you ask about a specific company it assembles a description from everything it has seen that mentions you. Your website is in there. So is your Google Business Profile, your Yelp listing, your LinkedIn page, your chamber of commerce directory entry, a supplier's partner page, an old press release, a review somebody wrote in 2019, and a job posting you forgot about.
When all of those agree, the model becomes confident and says your name plainly. When they disagree, it does what a cautious person would do, which is either speak vaguely or go with the option it feels surer about. That option is a competitor whose story happens to be more consistent, not necessarily one who is better at the job.
We are our own worst example. Ask Google's AI Overview about Onizuka Studio and it will currently tell you we build DNN websites. That was accurate for years. It has not been the main thing we do for a while, and the model has no idea, because a decade of pages and profiles and listings all still say the old thing and they outnumber the new ones.
Why this is a different problem than SEO
Search engine work has a satisfying quality to it, which is that it happens on property you control. You change the page, the crawler comes back, the change registers. GEO does not work like that. Most of the material forming the model's opinion of you lives on other people's websites, and you cannot edit it.
What you can do is make sure everything you do control says the same thing, in the same words, in enough places that it outweighs the old material. That means your site, your listings, your profiles, your directory entries, and anything you publish, all describing the business the same way. Not similar. The same. If your website says business systems auditing and your Google profile says web design and your LinkedIn says IT consulting, you have given the model three businesses to choose between and it will probably pick none of them.
It also means the description has to be specific enough to be useful. A model can only recommend you for something it can tell you do. Being described as a full-service technology partner is functionally the same as not being described at all, because no customer asks for that and no model can match a question to it.
What actually moves it
Fix your own site first, since it is the source everything else gets checked against, and there is no point building consistency across twelve directories while the home page still describes the business you ran in 2019.
Then go clean up the listings, and be prepared for how many there are. Most businesses have somewhere between fifteen and forty places they appear, half of which were created by somebody who left, and several of which nobody can log into anymore. Finding them is genuinely most of the work.
Then publish things that state clearly what you do and who for. Not marketing copy, which models are oddly good at discounting, but material that contains actual specifics. What you fixed, for whom, using what, and what happened. Specifics are what makes a description confident.
How much this should matter to you
Less than the people selling it will tell you. GEO retainers are being quoted at several thousand a month right now, largely because the market is new enough that buyers have no idea what it should cost, and a lot of what is being delivered is a listings cleanup and some schema work.
The honest read is that this is worth a few days of attention and then periodic checking, for most small businesses. It is worth considerably more than that if you are in a category where people research before they call, if you have recently changed what the business does, or if you are about to sell and want the description a buyer finds to match the one in your listing.
The last one catches people. A buyer's first move is to ask an assistant about the company. Whatever it says is the first impression, and it was assembled from material you stopped thinking about years ago.
Want to know what is being said about your business?
We test it directly, across the major assistants, as part of the audit. It takes about four minutes to do badly and rather longer to do in a way that tells you something actionable.
See what the audit checks →