Generative engine optimization, or GEO, is the practice of shaping your website so your business shows up inside the answers that AI tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Perplexity write for people. It is the newer name for the same goal as answer engine optimization: being one of the sources an AI reaches for when it composes a reply.
For a small-business owner, GEO matters because more people now read an AI’s summary instead of clicking through a page of links. If the assistant builds that summary from other businesses and never mentions yours, you are absent from the moment a customer is deciding. GEO is a close cousin of ordinary SEO: clear, well-structured, honest pages help both a search engine and an AI understand what you do and who you serve.
The difference is that an AI does not simply rank your page, it reads it and rewrites it into an answer. So plain language, direct answers, and clean structure matter even more, because a model can only quote and cite a page it can actually read and parse.
I build every site so the assistants can reach it, read it as clean text, and understand it, which is the necessary groundwork for being one of the sources an answer is built from. It is not a guarantee of a mention, but a page a model cannot read is one it can never choose.