Last week I typed a question into ChatGPT.
I asked it to recommend the best business coach for women in Yorkshire.
I did not appear.
I am a business coach for women in Yorkshire, with 13 years of experience, over 30,000 business owners coached, and more than £127 million of business facilitated. And I did not appear.
That is not a vanity problem. That is a commercial problem. Because 40% of people now use AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI instead of traditional Google to find businesses and get recommendations. And when those tools answer, they give two or three names. Not a page of ten links. Two or three names.
If your name is not in that answer, you do not exist to that buyer.
This is the problem that generative engine optimisation solves. And it is the most important thing I have learned about marketing in 2026.
Generative engine optimisation, or GEO, is the practice of structuring your content, your online presence, and your brand signals so that AI tools cite, recommend, and surface you when someone asks a question relevant to your business.
Traditional SEO is about ranking on Google. Getting your website to page one of search results. GEO is about something different. It is about being named inside the AI-generated answer itself, not just a link below it.
The difference matters because user behaviour has changed dramatically. ChatGPT now has over 800 million weekly active users. Google AI Overviews appear in roughly one in four searches. Perplexity is growing at extraordinary speed. When someone asks any of these tools who to hire, what to buy, or which programme to join, those tools synthesise an answer from multiple sources and name specific recommendations.
The businesses that appear in those answers are getting high-converting traffic. The businesses that do not are increasingly invisible.
You can rank number one on Google and still be completely invisible when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation. Generative engine optimisation is the discipline that closes that gap.
GEO does not replace SEO. It builds on top of it. Research shows that 93% of Google AI Overview citations link to pages that already rank in the top ten organic results, and 87% of ChatGPT citations match results from Bing's top ten.
What that means in practice: solid SEO is the foundation. GEO is the additional layer you build on top of it to get specifically cited and named by AI tools.
The key differences are:
That last point is the opportunity. Most UK businesses have not heard of GEO yet. The window to establish yourself as the go-to name in your space before your competitors figure this out is right now.
Here is the commercial reality. When someone asks an AI tool who the best business coach for women in Yorkshire is, the AI gives them two or three names. Those people book consultations with those names. They may never even search Google.
If your name is in the answer, you are on the shortlist before the potential client has visited a single website. If your name is not in the answer, you may never be considered at all.
A Princeton University research study proved that GEO methods can lift content visibility in AI answers by up to 40%, with specific, citation-worthy content and FAQ-structured writing driving the biggest gains.
AI traffic also converts at a higher rate than traditional search traffic. ChatGPT converts at between 14 and 16%. Perplexity at around 10%. These are extraordinary conversion rates compared to typical organic search, which suggests that people who arrive via AI recommendation are already warm and ready to act.
GEO is not a technical hack. It is not a loophole. It is the practice of making your business genuinely easier to discover, verify, and recommend. Here is what it involves.
AI tools verify your credibility by cross-referencing your business identity across multiple sources. Your business name, location, description, and services need to be identical everywhere they appear online. Your website, LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, Instagram, podcast profiles, directory listings, and any other platform you are on.
Different descriptions across platforms create entity confusion. AI cannot confidently identify who you are and will not recommend you.
Your own website saying you are the best business coach in Yorkshire means nothing to ChatGPT. A third party saying it is everything.
Press coverage, podcast appearances, guest articles, award mentions, reviews on credible platforms, and mentions in other people's content are all signals that AI tools use to verify your authority and include you in recommendations. This is the single highest leverage activity in GEO.
Generic statements do not get cited by AI tools. Specific, verifiable statements do. There is a significant difference between these two:
Your years of experience, your specific results, your named clients and their outcomes, your proprietary frameworks, all of these are citable. Use them consistently throughout your content.
FAQ sections are disproportionately powerful for GEO because they are pre-formatted question and answer pairs, exactly what AI tools extract when someone asks a question. Every blog post, every service page, and every piece of content you create should include a well-structured FAQ section with the exact questions your ideal client would type into an AI tool.
Schema is technical code added to your website that tells AI tools and search engines exactly who you are, what you do, where you are based, and what services you offer. It is not visible to website visitors, but it is read by every AI tool and search engine that crawls your site. Adding schema to your website is one of the highest-impact technical changes you can make for GEO.
The most important schema types for a service-based business are Person schema, LocalBusiness schema, FAQ schema on blog posts, and Event schema for any events you host.
AI tools are influenced by the volume and consistency of reviews across credible platforms. Getting 20 reviews in one month and then stopping does not work. Consistent, ongoing reviews on Google, Facebook, and Trustpilot signal to AI that your business is active and trusted.
Before you do anything else, run this test today. Open ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overview and type in the following prompts. Screenshot every result. This is your baseline.
Record whether you appear, how you are described, and who else appears alongside you. That screenshot is your starting point. Run the same prompts again in four weeks and compare. GEO progress is measurable, and it is faster than most people expect.
No. GEO builds on top of SEO rather than replacing it. Research shows that the vast majority of AI citations come from pages that already rank well in traditional search. Strong SEO remains the foundation. GEO is the additional layer that gets you specifically named and recommended inside AI-generated answers.
GEO takes a minimum of six to eight weeks to start showing measurable results. It is not instant, and it is not a quick fix. The businesses that are winning in AI search right now started working on it six to twelve months ago. The best time to start is immediately.
As of 2026, there is no paid placement mechanism in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity for organic recommendation responses. The businesses that appear do so because of genuine authority signals. This will likely change as AI advertising develops, but right now organic reputation is the only lever.
Yes, and local recommendation queries are one of the fastest-growing AI search use cases. When someone asks ChatGPT who the best business coach in Leeds is, or which marketing consultant to use in Sheffield, those are genuinely high commercial intent queries. Local businesses that get ahead of GEO now will have a significant advantage when the rest of the market catches up.
AEO stands for Answer Engine Optimisation and is sometimes used interchangeably with GEO. Both refer to optimising content for AI-generated answers rather than traditional ranked links. GEO tends to be the broader term covering the full range of strategies involved, while AEO focuses specifically on being selected as the answer inside AI-generated responses.
I am not just writing about generative engine optimisation. I am implementing it actively across everything I do.
Every blog I publish is structured to answer specific questions directly, include citable statistics from my own experience, and contain FAQ sections that AI tools can extract. My website is being updated with schema markup. I am actively building the third-party citation network that AI tools look for through press coverage, podcast appearances, and award applications.
And I am teaching this to the women I coach, because the businesses that understand GEO in 2026 will be the ones that dominate AI recommendations in 2027 and 2028.
If you want to understand how this applies to your specific business and start building your AI visibility alongside your marketing strategy, here is how to work with me:
And if you want to meet me in person alongside hundreds of ambitious women in business, join us at EMpowered Live 2027 - the flagship women's business conference at the OEC Sheffield on 12th March 2027. Get your tickets here.
Find out more at empoweredwithemily.com.
